Voting claims are real fraud

Secretary of State Kris Kobach says he advised President Trump to investigate voter fraud. How about they start by investigating how the votes of some Kansans weren’t counted last election? Or how Kobach’s rules and requirements kept thousands of other Kansans from registering?

Trump repeated his unsubstantiated claim last week that 3 million to 5 million “illegal” voters had cost him from winning the popular vote. He then asked for a “major investigation” into voter fraud.

Multiple organizations have examined the past election and found no evidence of significant voter fraud. However, there is evidence that legally registered voters in Kansas had their votes discarded.

More than 40,000 Kansans cast provisional ballots in November’s general election in the state’s 10 biggest counties. The majority of those ballots were counted, but 13,717 were not, including 2,194 in Sedgwick County.

Most of the rejected ballots were by people who hadn’t registered to vote. But some of the ballots were by people who said they registered online but whose names weren’t on local voter rolls.

Kobach told state lawmakers that a computer glitch prevented some registrations from being recorded. State officials were aware of the glitch and instructed local election officials to count the votes of anyone who presented an online screen shot showing that they had completed the registration process.

However, Kobach never told voters that there was a computer problem and that they should check to make sure they were on the voter rolls. He also didn’t tell them that they might need to bring a screen shot of their online registration (and, of course, most people did not think it was necessary to save a screen shot).

No one knows how many people experienced the registration problem and how many had their votes rejected.

Douglas County election officials tried to track the problem in their county, Associated Press reported. They documented 52 instances of voters who could prove they registered but were not on the voter rolls. An additional 92 people insisted they had registered but couldn’t provide screen-shot proof, so their votes were tossed.

In addition to people who registered properly but were not on the rolls, thousands of other Kansans had their registrations put “in suspense” because they didn’t provide proof of citizenship.

Kobach has tried to scare Kansans into thinking that voter fraud was a major problem. But as U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson noted last year, Kansas identified only three illegal voters from 1995 to 2013.

Kobach also apparently was the source of Trump’s claim that voter fraud cost him the popular vote.

Such exaggerated and unsubstantiated claims are the real fraud.

This story was originally published January 29, 2017 at 5:06 AM with the headline "Voting claims are real fraud."