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View Full Version : How the Case for Voter Fraud Was Tested — and Utterly Failed



RandomGuy
06-19-2018, 05:15 PM
The trial put much put the stake in the "voter fraud myth".

the proponent of that myth was laughably incompetent by all accounts, and the myth died in the light of day.


...when the top proponent was challenged in a Kansas courtroom to prove that such fraud is rampant, the claims went up in smoke.

In the end, the decision seemed inevitable. After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim. Kobach told The Kansas City Star at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal).

Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat. The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.

The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.


The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.

That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.For Kobach, the trial should’ve been a moment of glory. He’s been arguing for a decade that voter fraud is a national calamity. Much of his career has been built on this issue, along with his fervent opposition to illegal immigration. (His claim is that unlawful immigrants are precisely the ones voting illegally.) Kobach, who also co-chaired the Trump administration’s short-lived commission on voter fraud, is perhaps the individual most identified with the cause of sniffing out and eradicating phony voter registration. He’s got a gilded resume, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, and is seen as both the intellect behind the cause and its prime advocate. Kobach has written voter laws in other jurisdictions and defended them in court. If anybody ever had time to marshal facts and arguments before a trial, it was Kobach.

https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-kansas-trial

RandomGuy
06-19-2018, 05:21 PM
It’s always a bad idea for a lawyer to try the patience of a judge — and that’s doubly true during a bench trial, when the judge will decide not only the law, but also the facts. Kobach repeatedly annoyed Robinson with his procedural mistakes. But that was nothing next to what the judge viewed as Kobach’s intentional bad faith.

This view emerged in writing right after the trial — that’s when Robinson issued her ruling finding Kobach in contempt — but before the verdict. And the conduct that inspired the contempt finding had persisted over several years. Robinson concluded that Kobach had intentionally failed to follow a ruling she issued in 2016 that ordered him to restore the privileges of 17,000 suspended Kansas voters.

In her contempt ruling, the judge cited Kobach’s “history of noncompliance” with the order and characterized his explanations for not abiding by it as “nonsensical” and “disingenuous.” She wrote that she was “troubled” by Kobach’s “failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished.” Robinson ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s legal fees for the contempt proceeding.

That contempt ruling was actually the second time Kobach was singled out for punishment in the case. Before the trial, a federal magistrate judge deputized to oversee the discovery portion of the suit fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voting fraud document Kobach had prepared for Trump. Kobach paid the fine with a state credit card.

Winehole23
06-19-2018, 05:23 PM
anti-vote fraud legislation is the solution in search of a problem par excellence.

the shitty thing is that, as law, it prevents way more legit than fake votes.

Winehole23
06-19-2018, 05:24 PM
as designed

boutons_deux
06-19-2018, 05:39 PM
Judge Orders Kris Kobach to Take Remedial Legal Classes After Multiple Courtroom Blunders

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been ordered to take six hours of continuing legal education classes by a federal judge

due to his apparent lack of familiarity with the law.

He also lost his case;

overturning Kansas’ strict voter registration law.

“The disclosure violations. . . document a pattern and practice by [Kobach] of

flaunting disclosure and discovery rules that are designed to prevent prejudice and surprise at trial.

The Court ruled on each disclosure issue as it arose,

but given the repeated instances involved,

and the fact that Defendant resisted the Court’s rulings by continuing to try to introduce such evidence after exclusion,

the Court finds that further sanctions are appropriate.”

In plain English, that means Kobach wasn’t following the rules, and kept trying to break them when the court pushed back.

https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/kris-kobach-ordered-to-take-remedial-legal-classes-by-federal-judge/ (https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/kris-kobach-ordered-to-take-remedial-legal-classes-by-federal-judge/)

:lol

Winehole23
06-20-2018, 01:07 AM
31 credible incidents out of one biliion votes cast:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/06/a-comprehensive-investigation-of-voter-impersonation-finds-31-credible-incidents-out-of-one-billion-ballots-cast/ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/)

Winehole23
06-20-2018, 01:08 AM
absentee ballots and electronic security may actually deserve the concern, voter impersonation is strikingly rare.

Winehole23
06-20-2018, 01:21 AM
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has been ordered to take six hours of continuing legal education classes by a federal judge

due to his apparent lack of familiarity with the law.I think you have to factor in the hauteur of contempt but it's possible Kobach is a shitty lawyer too.

Winehole23
06-20-2018, 02:28 PM
wow


The elections director for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told county clerks in a conference call Tuesday to continue enforcing a proof of citizenship law that a federal judge ruled unconstitutional. (http://www.cjonline.com/news/20180618/judge-sides-with-aclu-in-voter-registration-fight-orders-kobach-to-go-to-school)


Bryan Caskey told the clerks not to make any changes until they receive written instruction otherwise. Danedri Herbert, a spokeswoman for Kobach, said the office needs time to fully review the court’s 118-page ruling before understanding it completely.
http://www.cjonline.com/news/20180620/kobachs-office-tells-counties-to-keep-enforcing-proof-of-citizenship-law

Winehole23
06-20-2018, 02:30 PM
She ordered Kobach to “instruct all state and county elections officers ... that voter registration applicants need not provide DPOC in order to be registered to vote, and need not provide any additional information in order to complete their voter registration applications.”

Herbert said it wasn’t clear how soon those directions should be made.

“I think ‘immediately’ is kind of open to interpretation,” she said.

spurraider21
06-20-2018, 02:36 PM
kim davis just splooshed

Winehole23
08-01-2018, 11:45 AM
lucrative trail of courtroom defeats:

https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobachs-lucrative-trail-of-courtroom-defeats

RandomGuy
08-01-2018, 12:03 PM
absentee ballots and electronic security may actually deserve the concern, voter impersonation is strikingly rare.

It is a myth.

Want your horses back yet?

RandomGuy
08-01-2018, 12:04 PM
lucrative trail of courtroom defeats:

https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobachs-lucrative-trail-of-courtroom-defeats

It is the new snake oil. Charlatan is a good word for it.

boutons_deux
08-04-2018, 10:50 AM
‘The most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of’: Trump panel found no voter fraud, ex-member says

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday,

accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that

he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.
Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state —

after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work,

which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel. :lol

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-abolishes-controversial-commission-studying-voter-fraud/2018/01/03/665b1878-f0e2-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?utm_term=.fdbd9dbc908f), the

panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud.

But the White House claimed at the time that it had

shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” :lol

due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states.

Kobach, too, spoke around that time (https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/01/03/exclusive-kris-kobach-voter-fraud-commission-being-handed-off-to-dhs-will-no-longer-be-stonewalled-by-dems/) about how

“some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.” :lol

underscore the hollowness of those claims:

“they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,”

he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”

“I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally,

but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

“We had more transparency on a deer task force than I had on a presidential commission,” :lol

he said.

“We had probably a dozen meetings.

They were all public.

We published everything we did in the newspaper and published results, including information we got from the public.”

In contrast, the voter-integrity panel was marked by obfuscation, secrecy and confusion

related to the work the panel was engaged in.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/08/03/the-most-bizarre-thing-ive-ever-been-a-part-of-trump-panel-found-no-voter-fraud-ex-member-says/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c5b339c02fec&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1

You racist Repugs are lying sons of bitches.

Thanks, Kockistan Kansas.

Winehole23
08-05-2018, 01:26 AM
a commissioner for DJT's voter fraud commission was excluded from meetings had to sue to see the documents:

http://paceidocs.sosonline.org/

RandomGuy
08-06-2018, 12:44 PM
a commissioner for DJT's voter fraud commission was excluded from meetings had to sue to see the documents:

http://paceidocs.sosonline.org/

Eyup. Headed up by the same guy in the Propublica article in the OP (Korbach)

Dude is, in essence a snake oil salesman.

boutons_deux
08-06-2018, 02:05 PM
a commissioner for DJT's voter fraud commission was excluded from meetings had to sue to see the documents:

http://paceidocs.sosonline.org/

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=274383&p=9501143&viewfull=1#post9501143

boutons_deux
08-08-2018, 04:14 PM
Kris Kobach refuses to recuse himself from conducting recount of his own election (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/8/1786831/-Kris-Kobach-refuses-to-recuse-himself-from-conducting-recount-of-his-own-election)

Kobach would be “well advised to remove any appearance of impropriety” and that “fairness would dictate that Mr. Kobach personally recuse himself” and that

both legal and ethical guidelines would lead Kobach to stepping back.

Because the “voter fraud expert” who chaired Trump’s commission and loudly announced there were “three to five million” illegal votes out there based on zero evidence, is

suddenly convinced that 191 votes is such a huge margin that there’s simply no point in even looking at it.

As the Kansas City Star (https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/election/article216299955.html)reports (https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/election/article216299955.html), Kobach is shocked, shocked, that his opponent would even consider such a thing.

“If the margin is less than 10 votes or something extraordinarily close, I would expect any person to call for a recount,” Kobach said.

“A recount would take a significant amount of time to do a recount statewide. It also depends on what kind.”


in the 27 statewide recounts that took place between 2000 and 2016,

the average change in the outcome was 219 votes.

Which is, hmm, more than Kobach’s current edge in Kansas.

So yes. Maybe this recount is worth doing, even if it takes a “significant amount of time.”

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1786831

Just like Scalia/2000, there is no time for recount to assure accuracy and that the right person won, no need to treat the voters as important.

Repugs want power at all costs, if "democracy gets fucked", no problem. Power is all they want.

Winehole23
09-16-2021, 10:50 PM
pay up, suckers

1438707522651705346

Winehole23
09-16-2021, 10:52 PM
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Secretary of State Scott Schwab prolonged the legal fight, and extended its costs, by appealing Robinson’s ruling. The state lost the appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene.

boutons_deux
09-16-2021, 11:07 PM
The Repugs' Big Lies (instead of actually governing)

Nationwide in-person voter fraud, esp by non-citizens

Biden stole the election from Trash (therefore, Repugs have the "right" to cheat and steal any election from any Dem)

RandomGuy
09-17-2021, 04:33 PM
It was always a scam.

Sell racists on lies that gave them cover to gut brown people voting rights in ways that would never hold up in court, then get paid to defend the lies the racist suckers passed.

Grifty grifters gotta grift. Shwifty.