Kris Kobach Backs Trump's Spurious Claims About Fraudulent Votes

Click here for an article at McClatchy by Bryan Lowry entitled "Trump adviser Kobach backs disputed Trump claim of millions illegally voting."

Kris Kobach, who is expected to soon be given a position in Trump's team (Secretary of Homeland Security?), is Secretary of State in Kansas. He is possibly the nation's most prominent proponent of anti-immigrant policies. Click here for his Wikipedia entry. He is probably best known as the author of Arizona's notorious "show your papers" law, signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in 2008:

Kobach played a significant role in the drafting of Arizona SB 1070, a state law that attracted national attention as the country's broadest and strictest—at the state level—illegal immigration measure in a long time, and has assisted in defending the state during the ongoing legal battle over SB 1070's legality.

The law was contested in federal courts, and finally struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012. Kobach has helped to draft similar anti-immigrant laws in several other states.

Here's a little gem from Kobach's Wikipedia entry:

In response to a caller on his March 1, 2015 radio show, Kobach agreed that it would not be “a huge jump” for the Obama administration to call for an end to the prosecution of all African-American suspects.

The comment stirred up considerable controversy: "...the Kansas Senate Minority Leader, Anthony Hensley, called Kobach "...the most racist politician in America today" and called upon him to resign from office." Of course, Kobach is a strong Trump supporter. Here are his views on Trump's famous wall:

In February 2016, Kobach endorsed Donald Trump in his campaign for the U.S. Presidency, citing his stance on immigration. Kobach has proposed a halt to what he claims to be $23 billion in annual remittances by Mexican nationals illegally living in the U.S. unless Mexico makes a one-time $5–10 billion payment for Trump's proposed wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But I digress; the subject of the post is Trump's tweet:

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.

This ridiculous claim is completely unsupported; the only person to have been caught voting illegally in the recent election was a Trump supporter who voted twice: Terri Lynn Rote, from Des Moines, Iowa, who is facing a charge of election misconduct.

Kobach, as Kansas Secretary of State, certified the state's election results on Wednesday; moments later, he said: “I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point."

At least Koback pointed to some "evidence" to support his claim -- debunked, spurious, but at least it's something:

Kobach pointed to a widely disputed study released by two Old Dominion University political scientists in 2014 that found that noncitizens voted at a rate of 11.3 percent in the 2008 election. The study has been rebutted repeatedly by by other election scholars.

Click here for an article at FactCheck.Org which thoroughly debunks Trump's -- and now Kobach's -- claim.

So, what can we expect from the Trump team on immigration "reform"? McClatchy says:

Kobach, who advised Trump on immigration throughout the campaign, would not say Wednesday whether he was advising the president-elect to pursue a nationwide proof of citizenship requirement.

Papers, please! But some Latinos can be quite fair-skinned; should we force them to wear some sort of identifying mark? A yellow star, perhaps?