Voting rights are on life support, Trump and Kansas doing their best to pull the plug | Opinion
“In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
— Donald Trump, July 26, 2024
“Fixed” is a pretty good word to describe what President Trump and the Kansas Legislature have decided to do to our elections.
Personally, I’d have gone with “rigged.”
Neither our dear leader Donald, nor our good ol’ boy lawmakers in Topeka have any respect whatsoever for the rights of American voters in Kansas or anywhere else.
Never has that been on display more graphically than this week.
On Tuesday, state lawmakers found the last votes they needed to repeal a law allowing a three-day period for the counting of votes that are mailed on time, but that the Postal Service is late in delivering. That’s 2,100 or so Kansas voters disenfranchised per election, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The same day, Trump issued an executive order resurrecting Kris Kobach’s long-discredited notion that you should have to provide paper documents to prove you’re a citizen to register to vote. It also bans counting mail ballots postmarked before election day but delivered after, and Trump hinted at even more severe restrictions to come.
To dispose of the argument that always comes up whenever this is written about, we’re not talking about showing your driver’s license at the polling site. Proof of citizenship requires producing a government-certified copy of your birth certificate, passport or naturalization documents — and maybe other records on top of those — to even get on the voting rolls.
When Kobach tried it in 2011, it was an unconditional disaster.
More than 30,000 legitimate Kansas voters had their registrations suspended. The only reason they ever got back on the voting rolls was that the federal appeals court in Denver ruled Kobach couldn’t make it stick because it directly conflicted with federal law.
Suppressing your vote
The Republican Party of my younger days was all about making it easier for people to vote.
Even as recently as 2017, the law that the Kansas Legislature just repealed passed with overwhelming support from Republicans, rightly concerned that mail delays could disenfranchise rural voters.
After Gov. Laura Kelly reminded them of that in a veto message on Monday, 84 state reps and 30 senators ignored that concern and voted to override.
What changed? Data happened.
Over several election cycles, a higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans voted by mail.
So our GOP dominated Legislature and our increasingly Putinesque president are doing everything they can to suppress those votes.
It’s an established fact that proof-of-citizenship requirements fall hardest on women, who often have to provide the state additional documentation to trace name changes due to marriage and divorce.
It also hits poor people, who have to decide whether to spend money on a tank of gas to get to work, or to pay one state to print a hard copy of their birth certificate from its computer and snail-mail it, so they can hand-carry it to an another state office to be scanned into their computer.
Possibly more galling than the insult to our rights as citizens is the insult to our intelligence.
Republican legislators always couch their anti-democracy stance in the language of “securing” our elections.
It does nothing of the sort.
Kobach’s folly
As former secretary of state and now attorney general, Kobach has been in direct charge of prosecuting voter fraud in Kansas for 10 years now.
During that time, his batting average is about one hit per year.
He’s never caught an “illegal alien” illegally voting, despite his vow that he’d find thousands. If he had, even once, we’d have never heard the end of it.
Instead, Kobach’s 10 or so prosecutions established that the dominant face of voting fraud in Kansas is white, wealthy and Republican, with houses in two states and an entitlement mentality leading them to believe they deserve to vote both at home and at their vacation chalet.
The 114 Kansas legislators (out of 165 total) who voted to strip your voting rights didn’t do it for anybody’s “security” but their own.
They’re addicted to being called “Representative,” or “Senator” for four months a year and will say or do anything to keep themselves in power and perks.
They’re lying about illegal voting and have been for years, while laughing behind their hand that anyone’s dumb enough to believe them.
Trump, as deranged and deluded as he is, believes to the depth of his soul that voting for anyone other than him or one of his camp followers is a vote against America.
He pardoned the 1,500-plus who stormed the U.S. Capitol trying to overturn the 2020 election — not because they were innocent, but because they committed crimes for him and he loves them for it.
I expect that as soon as his executive order on proof of citizenship gets before the courts, judges will tell him the same thing they told Kobach — you can’t do that because it’s against the law.
Then he’ll respond as he has for years, that he is the law and no court can tell him what he can or can’t do.
God only knows how long it will take to unravel this mess. Kobach’s case took seven years from start to finish.
So in the meantime, if you’re one of the lucky ones who still gets to vote in Kansas in 2026, you might want to think twice about voting for your Trump-muppet incumbent senator, congressman or state legislator, who sees you as nothing more than their useful idiot.
