Kris Kobach’s False Claims About Voter Fraud

From Wikipedia:

* In a 2010 press conference, Kobach asserted there could be as many as 2,000 people who were using the identities of dead people to vote in Kansas, mentioning it “certainly seems like a very real possibility” that “Albert K. Brewer” was an example of one such deceased individual who had voted in a recent primary.[140] When The Wichita Eagle followed up on Kobach’s assertion, it discovered Brewer, 78 years old, was still alive, although his father, who was born in 1904 and had a different middle initial, had died in 1996. Brewer told the Eagle reporter, “I don’t think this is heaven, not when I’m raking leaves.”[28]

Kobach has also said that there are 18,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas, a claim that NBC News described as “misleading” and “debunked”.[16]

Kobach supported Trump’s claims that millions of non-citizens voted in the 2016 presidential election.[141][142] Kobach estimated that 3.2 million non-citizens voted, citing a widely debunked study.[143] Kobach complained that, during one of his appearances, CNN ran text on the screen saying Kobach’s claims that millions illegally voted in the 2016 election were “false”.[144] CNN also asked him if he had any proof of his allegation that thousands of Massachusetts voters actually had voted in New Hampshire in 2016. He replied that he had none.[45]

In September 2017, Kobach claimed to have proof that voter fraud swung the 2016 Senate race in New Hampshire and may have swung New Hampshire’s 2016 presidential vote; fact-checkers and election experts found that Kobach’s assertion was false.[145][146][147] Kobach claimed that more than 5,000 individuals voted by using out-of-state driving licenses as identification, even though New Hampshire residents are required to update their licenses in order to drive.[148] However, New Hampshire state law allows residents of the state who happen to have out-of-state driving licenses to vote.[149][150] There are a number of reasons why some voters may use out-of-state driving licenses, with the most likely being that they are out-of-state college students.[148][151][152] Numerous legitimate New Hampshire voters said that this was the case with them; they were students at colleges in New Hampshire who had yet to update their driving license.[146] New Hampshire Public Radio also found that most instances of out-of-state driving licenses being used were in college towns.[153] Another reason is that they may be military personnel on active duty.[149] FactCheck.Org described Kobach’s claim as “baseless” and “bogus”, noting that Kobach “hasn’t provided evidence of any illegal voting”.[145] Later that September, Kobach backtracked on his claims, but said that there have been “anecdotal reports” about voter fraud.[154]

Richard L. Hasen, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Irvine, an election law expert, has described Kobach as a “charlatan”, “provocateur” and “a leader nationally in making irresponsible claims that voter fraud is a major problem in this country.”[155][12]

* In 2015, Kobach received from the legislature and the governor the right to prosecute cases of voter fraud, after claiming for four years that Kansas had a massive problem of voter fraud that the local and state prosecutors were not adequately addressing. At that time, he “said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting.” Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its Secretary of State such authority.[156] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[18][109][19] One case was dropped. The other two were still pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.

* Kobach examined 84 million votes that were cast in 22 states, but referred only 14 cases to be prosecuted.[162] University of Kansas assistant professor of political science Patrick Miller includes voter intimidation as a form of fraud. “The substantially bigger issue with voter fraud has been election fraud being perpetrated by election officials and party officials tampering with votes … It is not the rampant problem that the public believes that is there. Kris Kobach says it is. Donald Trump says it is. And the data just aren’t there to prove it. It’s a popular misconception that this is a massive problem.”[157]

A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[157]

REPORT:

* University of Kansas assistant professor of political science Patrick Miller defines voter fraud as manipulating the process of an election, either by perjury, casting multiple votes, voter intimidation or improper vote counting.

“In a broad sense, anytime you have someone voting who’s not eligible to vote,” they cancel out the vote of someone who is, said Bryan Caskey, state election director in the Kansas Secretary of State’s office. “And in highly contested elections, that’s a big deal. In Kansas, every election cycle we have elections that are decided by a handful of votes. … So it doesn’t take much for an outcome of an election to be changed if people are voting who are not eligible to vote.”

The SAFE law targets voter impersonation, not other variations of voter fraud. Since the legislation went into effect in 2012, six cases of voter fraud have been prosecuted.

* Paul Baker, a supervising judge who oversees Election Day operations at Precinct 9 in Lawrence, said he doesn’t see rampant voter fraud.

“I mean, there is always some possibility (of voter fraud), but it is always very unlikely,” Baker said. “There are so many procedures we go through to verify who they are, and the fact if they are registered or unregistered. We have a whole procedure and do training ahead of time.”

* When it comes to voter fraud, Miller said, the bigger issue should be whether election officials are tampering with elections, not individual voters.

“The substantially bigger issue with voter fraud has been election fraud being perpetrated by election officials and party officials tampering with votes,” Miller said. “You know, doing things like throwing books out, making up votes, creating ballots for people who didn’t show up and blatantly counting ballots the other way.”

Miller said Kansas has never had a significant history of voter fraud compared with other states. Throughout U.S. history, he said, voter fraud hasn’t been a single-party issue.

“The people that would be most likely (to have the most difficulty) to provide birth certificate to register to vote would be people who have moved into the state and are seeking a new license,” said KU journalism professor David Guth, who teaches a class on elections. “It could be older people. Some of the research I have seen has suggested that some of the people most likely to have difficulty providing that kind of information tend to vote Democratic.

“And so I’m just suspicious with (Kobach’s) motives. I just have not seen evidence that there is widespread voter fraud in Kansas.”

A number of states, including Ohio, South Carolina and Georgia, have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to investigate voter fraud in the 2012 election. Those states combined came up with fewer than 40 cases.

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Heritage Foundation’s Hans Von Spakovsky’s False Claims About Voter

From Wikipedia:

According to the New Yorker, von Spakovsky has promoted “the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections”.[5]

Von Spakovsky has supported his claims about the extent of voter fraud by citing a 2000 investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which purported to find 5400 instances of deceased people in Georgia voting in the last two decades.[5] The Journal-Constitution later revised its findings, noting that it had no evidence of a single deceased person voting and that the vast majority of the instances were due to clerical errors.[5]

In an interview with the New Yorker, von Spakovsky cited two scholars who he said could substantiate that voter-impersonation fraud was a significant threat: Robert Pastor of American University and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.[5] Von Spakovsky said that Pastor had personally experienced voter impersonation, but Pastor refuted von Spakovsky’s claim, saying, “I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake. I don’t think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem.”[5] Both Pastor and Sabato said that they would only support voter ID laws if voter IDs were made free and easily available to all, which is not what Republicans have tried.[5] Sabato, the author of “Dirty Little Secrets,” also described voter impersonation as “relatively rare today.”[5] In a 2011 article published by the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky again referred to Sabato as an authority to establish the existence of common voter fraud, along with “Stealing Elections,” a book by John Fund, whose claims of voter fraud have been extensively debunked,[32][33] and whom he neglects to identify as the co-author of a book they jointly wrote. He describes the efforts of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, his colleague both at the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity and Heritage, to expose the alleged existence of extensive voter fraud, as “carefully described research,” although Kobach’s claims have also been shown to be vastly overstated.[34]

In a court decision, Fish v. Kobach, US District Court Judge Julie A. Robinson ruled that von Spakovsky’s claims of widespread voter fraud were not in fact found to be backed up with provable researched cases. Judge Robinson wrote that she gave his testimony little weight because it was “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples of non-citizen voter registration, mostly outside the State of Kansas.” She also noted that during the proceedings, Mr. von Spakovsky “could not identify any expert on the subject of non-citizen voter registration.” When he tried to use a list of 30 people provided by a Kansas election official as proof of voter fraud in one county, Judge Robinson wrote in her decision: “He later admitted during cross-examination that he had no personal knowledge as to whether or not any of these individuals had in fact falsely asserted U.S. citizenship when they became registered to vote and he did not examine the facts of these individual cases.”[35] Judge Robinson found witnesses for the defense were often found to be not credible, finding: “Defendant’s expert Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, ‘a think tank whose mission [is to] formulate and promote conservative public policies’.” Von Spakovsky “…cited a U.S. GAO study for the proposition that the GAO ‘found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration roles over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens’.” However, on cross-examination, he admitted that the GAO study contained information on a total of eight district courts; half reported that not one non-citizen had been called for jury duty. The three remaining district courts reported that less than 1% of those called for jury duty from voter rolls were noncitizens. Therefore, his report misleadingly described the single district court with the highest percentage of people reporting that they were noncitizens, while omitting mention of the seven other courts described in the GAO report, including four that had zero incidents of noncitizens on voting rolls.[36] Robinson said, “While von Spakovsky’s lack of academic background is not fatal to his credibility …., his clear agenda and misleading statements … render his opinions unpersuasive.”

According to Professor Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine, “there are a number of people who have been active in promoting false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud and using that as a pretext to argue for stricter voting and registration rules. And von Spakovsky’s at the top of the list.”[4] Hasen said that Spakovsky’s appointment to Donald Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity was a “a big middle finger” from Trump to people “serious about fixing problems with our elections.”[4]

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‘Ripe for error’: Ballot signature verification is flawed — and a big factor in the election

From the Los Angeles Times Oct. 28, 2020:

Mail-in ballots are pouring in by the millions to election offices across the country, getting stacked and prepared for processing. But before the count comes the signature test.

Election workers eyeball voter signatures on ballots one by one, comparing the loop of an “L” or the squiggle of an “S” against other samples of that person’s writing.

When performed by professionals in criminal cases or legal proceedings, signature verification can take hours. But election employees in many states must do the job in as little as five seconds.

In an election marked by uncertainty amid the pandemic, the signature verification process represents one of the biggest unknowns: whether a system riddled with vulnerabilities will work on such a massive scale.

In 2016, mismatched signatures were the most common reason that mail ballots were rejected, according to federal officials. With record numbers of people voting by mail this cycle, ballots thrown out for signature problems and other issues have the potential to decide races where the margin of victory is slim.

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How do states protect and verify absentee/mail-in ballots? (2020)

From Ballotpedia:

* All 50 states require a valid signature for an absentee/mail-in ballot to be counted. According to The New York Times, 32 states use the signature provided with a voter’s absentee/mail-in ballot to verify his or her identity by comparing it with the signature on file (e.g., the signature on a driver’s license or voter registration application). Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia practice signature matching and allow voters to remedy mismatches. Another four states practice signature matching, but do not allow voters to remedy mismatches. Eighteen states either do not have signature matching laws or do not practice signature matching on a regular basis.[1]

Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, told The New York Times that signature matching “is the best way to strike a balance between security, transparency, and accessibility for voters” when done properly, including a process to fix signature mismatches. Mark Gaber, the director of trial litigation at the Campaign Legal Center, said that signature matching was problematic, with courts having found “that there’s a high risk of wrongly being identified as not having signed your ballot.”

* Most states have laws allowing someone other than a voter to return the voter’s absentee/mail-in ballot. These laws, referred to as ballot collection or ballot harvesting laws, vary by state. As of August 2020, 24 states and the District of Columbia permitted someone chosen by the voter to return the ballot on the voter’s behalf in most cases. Twelve states specified who may return ballots (i.e., household members, caregivers, and/or family members) in most cases. One state explicitly allowed only the voter to return his or her ballot. Thirteen states did not specify whether someone may return another’s ballot.

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Trump And Allies Keep Claiming Republican Poll Watchers Were Banned—That’s A Lie

From Forbes.com Nov. 10, 2020:

President Donald Trump, during an address to the nation on Thursday, attempted to delegitimize and attack the integrity of the 2020 U.S. election by falsely asserting that election officials in Pennsylvania and Michigan tried to ban Republican observers from polling stations, an accusation for which he provided no evidence.

“In Pennsylvania, Democrats have gone to the state Supreme Court to try and ban our election observers,” Trump declared Thursday evening, adding, “They don’t want anybody watching them as they count the ballots.”

This is untrue, as there is zero evidence of Democrats attempting to ban Republican representatives from observing the counting of votes.

The president is seemingly referring to a case adjudicated Thursday morning in which the Trump campaign was requesting closer observation of the ballot canvassing process in Pennsylvania, but legitimate poll watchers were never systemically barred from any location.

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