After years of trying, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach just got the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to do what he wants. All it took was an edict from the EAC’s new executive director, Brian Newby – who just happens to be the former Kobach-backed elections commissioner of Johnson County. Kobach had been fighting with the EAC in and out of court over whether Kansans who use the federal voter registration form, which only asks applicants to swear they are U.S. citizens, should be compelled to prove U.S. citizenship, as state law has required since 2013 of those using the state form. He believed he could consider federally registered voters to be partially registered, and throw out their votes for local and state elections.
Just last month a Shawnee County District Court judge found the right to vote in Kansas is not tied to the form of registration, and that Kobach has no such authority to “encumber the voting process” with such a bifurcated system of registration and vote counting.
But in letters sent Jan. 29 – without public notice or his commissioners’ review – Newby notified Kansas, Alabama and Georgia that would-be voters who used the federal registration form in those states would have to provide citizenship documentation.
That’s the decision Kobach had sought from the EAC since a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (which he lost) that said “a state may request that the EAC alter the federal form to include information the state deems necessary to determine eligibility.”
Full Article: Kobach gets assist on voter registration | The Wichita Eagle.