Kris Kobach pushed Trump’s election fraud lie. As AG, he’d pull Kansas back into it

Before Donald Trump’s failed insurrection, there was Kris Kobach.

Before the 2020 presidential election, before Trump spent the aftermath making wildly false allegations that the presidency had been stolen, before Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to betray his oath of office on Jan. 6, 2021, and send the election back to the states, and before Trump urged his supporters to march so disastrously on the Capitol, before all of that: There was Kris Kobach.

You remember him, don’t you?

Most Kansans know Kobach as a perennial — and mostly failed — Republican candidate for statewide office. He actually did win once, serving two terms as Kansas secretary of state, but that gig ended ignominiously: His legal defense of the state’s voter citizenship law was so shoddy that the judge found him in contempt and ordered him to take remedial law classes. The state ended up paying out $1.9 million in the case.

Kobach ran for governor in 2018, and failed. He ran for Pat Roberts’ U.S. Senate seat in 2020, and failed. And in the midst of all these failures, he tried to help Trump prove that millions of votes had been illegally cast in the 2016 presidential election — and failed again.

That may sound ridiculous: Didn’t Trump win the 2016 election? Well, yes, he won the Electoral College vote and thus the presidency. But he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Trump being Trump, he insisted this couldn’t be the case — that she must have been the beneficiary of millions of improper votes. There had to have been malfeasance, right?

That’s where Kobach came in.

In 2017, Trump picked Kobach to lead his Election Integrity Commission to prove the unproven fraud. And Kobach kicked off the investigation with some rather spectacular claims.”We have discovered 128 specific cases of non-citizens who either registered to vote or attempting to register to vote,” he told the press. “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. One expert in the case estimated the total number could be in excess of 18,000 on our voter rolls,”

It was all nonsense. Even if true, though, the existence of a few hundred — or even a few thousands — improper voter registrations couldn’t have explained the difference between Trump and Clinton’s popular vote totals. The commission disbanded a year after it started, with Kobach insisting that electoral fraud was a real and rampant problem and everybody else pretty much rolling their eyes at his weak claims. It was an embarrassment.

But Kobach’s efforts on Trump’s behalf also served as a sort of dry run for the falsehoods, conspiracy theories and scheming that marked the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. As we’ve seen from the Jan. 6 committee hearings, the truth — that Joe Biden won, and that any mix-ups in the voting process weren’t nearly enough to turn the election in Trump’s favor — was irrelevant. All that mattered was staying in power.

Kobach, meanwhile, is now running for office again, this time for Kansas attorney general.The GOP primary is Aug. 2. If victorious, he will try once again to drag the state and its taxpayers along for his endless, fruitless culture war crusade. His campaign website lists five priorities for the AG’s office. No. 2 on the list? “Prosecute voter fraud.”

Here we go again.

Leave aside the wisdom of hiring an attorney general whose legal representation has already been so costly to Kansans. Kobach has spent the last decade trying and failing to prove the existence of voter fraud. Either he’s wrong about the scope of the problem, or he’s right and simply lousy at ferreting it out. Neither possibility suggests that he is right for the job of being the state’s top lawyer. More likely, Kris Kobach is another Jan. 6 disaster waiting to happen.