Voting laws hurt Trump

Secretary of State Kris Kobach finally found a non-citizen voter.

On the hunt since the SAFE Act passed in 2011, Kobach recently secured a guilty plea from Victor David Garcia Bebek, a Peruvian national who voted in three different elections in Sedgwick County. This brings Kobach’s total number of prosecutions up to eight – Bebek, plus seven people each caught voting in two different states.

Unfortunately, there are a few difficulties.

First, Bebek recently became an American citizen. While millions of Americans are too apathetic to vote, Bebek was so eager to participate that he had already registered and voted before completing the naturalization process. For this, he gets three years of probation and a $5,000 fine. Welcome to America.

Bebek’s case may be typical. For example, political scientist Jesse Richman is often mentioned by President Trump and by Kobach, because Richman says he found cases of non-citizen voting.

Yet Richman recently issued a statement asking Trump, Kobach and other politicians to stop citing his research. Richman never claimed that undocumented immigrants are the ones casting ballots, and he does not want his name associated with it.

The problems only get worse from there. More then 30,000 “suspense voters” have had their registrations canceled by Kobach under the SAFE Act, while he has only found these eight fraud cases: less than 0.003 percent the voters purged from the rolls. Furthermore, all eight cases could have been identified before the SAFE Act.

Next comes my own research. My county-by-county analysis indicates that voters were more likely to shift toward Trump in states that did not have these new voting laws. That means the new voting laws may have actually hurt Trump. Not only that, but in some states there is evidence of a backlash – Democrats capitalize on the anger of those who feel targeted, and campaign on themes such as “don’t let them take your vote away.”

In several states, the voter turnout and Hillary Clinton’s performance were actually higher where restrictive laws were in place. This is true even when accounting for other factors such as the state of the local economy, the percentage of white residents, and urban/rural differences.

The results make sense, since reporters for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution discovered that Trump’s vote totals surged in rural counties with a lot of new and infrequent voters. Having gotten out of the habit of voting, or having never been in that habit in the first place, these voters are likely to be the most befuddled by the new laws. Without the new laws, Trump may have won several states by larger margins, including Kansas.

Kobach talks a lot about undocumented immigrant voters, but where are they? What he has actually accomplished is to shrink voting rolls, prosecute a new American citizen for voting, and find hardly any voter fraud. Now we can add holding down Trump’s vote totals to these achievements.

This story was originally published April 22, 2017 at 5:04 AM with the headline "Voting laws hurt Trump."