Michael A. Smith: Purging voters a misguided idea

Secretary of State Kris Kobach has proposed two rule changes to the Secure and Fair Elections Act, the 2011 law passed at Kobach’s urging that requires voters to show proof of citizenship in order to register and photo ID in order to vote.

One uncontroversial change would stipulate that a Kansas voter would not need to show said proof of citizenship a second time when moving to and reregistering in another county within the state. This is fine, but the problem lies in the second proposal.

Kobach is proposing to remove Kansas’ “suspense voters” from the rolls after 90 days. Suspense voters – currently more than 30,000 and climbing – are the ones who registered to vote but did not provide proof of citizenship or meet some other requirement. They now remain in limbo, neither registered nor unregistered, until they provide said proof, usually in the form of a birth certificate.

For people born out of state or without birth certificates, this can be an onerous, time-consuming and expensive task – so much so that courts in both Texas and Wisconsin have ruled it a poll tax, which is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions.

Removing suspense voters from the registration rolls after only 90 days is a bad idea, even possibly illegal.

First of all, in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council (2013), the U.S. Supreme Court held that voters do not need to show proof of citizenship in order to register and vote in federal elections. For a state to require otherwise would violate the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, popularly known as “motor voter.” If voters who registered on the federal form are eliminated from the rolls in Kansas, they will would be stripped of their lawful right to vote in federal elections, putting Kansas in violation of both the law and the court ruling.

Second, a substantial number of suspense voters do complete their registrations. My own data analysis with colleagues indicates that about 16 percent of them completed their registration within an eight-month period – nearly three times the 90 days under this proposed rule change.

Third, Kansans are typically allowed to register up to 21 days before an upcoming election in which they wish to vote. As per the SAFE Act, suspense voters are allowed to show proof of citizenship and complete their registrations up until the day of the election. Suspense voters may seek to complete their registrations as a major election approaches, and this rule change would deny them the right to do that unless they reregistered 21 days before the election, when they had been led to believe they had until the day of the election to complete their registrations.

One last thing: The numbers in play here greatly dwarf the number of voters actually accused of voter fraud. A 2011 report from the secretary of state’s own office suggested only 221 cases of possible but unverified voter fraud between 1997 and 2010 – a 13-year period. That comes out to 0.007 percent of the number currently on the suspense list, now facing removal from the voting rolls because of this proposed rule change.

This story was originally published September 4, 2015 at 7:05 PM with the headline "Michael A. Smith: Purging voters a misguided idea."