Republican former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has always been keen on voter suppression, pushing voter ID laws, whacking people from the voter rolls, and pushing a law that required people registering to vote to prove their citizenship. In 2011, Sam Brownback, who was then the state’s Republican governor, signed Kobach’s Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, which, among other things, mandated that Kansas voters prove they are U.S. citizens. In 2013-2015, 36,000 Kansans had their registrations placed in a suspense file because they couldn’t immediately prove they were citizens.
Kobach has also been heavily involved in pushing to add the citizenship question to the U.S. census. He said in 2018 that he had raised the issue with Donald Trump shortly after his inauguration. In March 2018, despite strong objections from Democrats, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross added the question for the 2020 census. Litigation ensued to stop it.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court said it will take up the matter in a review of a case decided against Ross by a district court judge. The court’s ruling could have a tremendous impact on how many people refuse to answer census questions next year. And those uncounted people could reduce Democratic representation in Congress when districts are redrawn and affect how billions of dollars of federal money are distributed to the states.
Ross had said he acted after he was asked by the Justice Department to add the question, because it would help enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But that rationale, according to Judge Jesse M. Furman of the United States District Court in Manhattan in a ruling last month, was bogus. Adam Liptak reports:
He concluded that Mr. Ross had dissembled, saying that “the evidence is clear that Secretary Ross’s rationale was pretextual.”
“While the court is unable to determine — based on the existing record, at least — what Secretary Ross’s real reasons for adding the citizenship question were, it does find, by a preponderance of the evidence, that promoting enforcement of the” Voting Rights Act, or V.R.A. “was not his real reason for the decision,” Judge Furman wrote. “Instead, the court finds that the V.R.A. was a post hoc rationale for a decision that the secretary had already made for other reasons.”
What the evidence showed, according to Furman, was that the letter from the Justice Department was a move “to launder their request through another agency — that is, to obtain cover for a decision that they had already made.” In seeking a review of the matter from the Supreme Court, an official of the Trump regime said that citizenship questions have been asked by U.S. census takers in the past; other nations ask this question; and the commerce secretary has wide discretion in how to handle the census.
If the citizenship question is allowed, a government estimate puts the number of people who may refuse to participate at 6.5 million.