Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach just wrote an editorial in Breitbart that claims to prove voter fraud in New Hampshire — even though its "proof" is in fact anything but.
Here is the crux of Kobach's claim in Breitbart:
According to statistics released by the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, on the date of the general election in November 2016, there were 6,540 same-day registrants who registered to vote in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver’s license to prove their identity. In and of itself, that doesn’t prove that any fraud occurred – theoretically, each of those individuals could have been someone who recently moved to the State and had not yet had time to get a New Hampshire driver’s license. According to New Hampshire law, a new resident has 60 days to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license.
Kobach wrote that "only 1,014 of the 6,540 same-day registrants who registered with an out-of-state license had obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license" and that "of those 5,526, only 213 registered a vehicle in New Hampshire." As a result, he concluded that 5,313 of those voters "never were bona fide residents of the state" and that their votes could have been enough to elect Maggie Hassan to the Senate and award the state's four electoral votes to Hillary Clinton.
Philip J. Bump of The Washington Post poked major holes in Kobach's argument:
Or, you know, maybe they don’t have cars. Or, as pointed out by the Daily Mail’s David Martosko, once in the running to be Trump’s press secretary, maybe they are college students. Or both. Our David Weigel put out a call on social media for people who might be included among those voters above and, in short order, found four. Among them? The chair of the College Democrats at Dartmouth.
Bump noted that Kobach's meritless argument was particularly troubling because he is co-chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
"His commission, in fact, could ask New Hampshire for the data to investigate these 5,000 cases itself, at which point Kobach could inform the public about whether or not fraud had been proven," Bump observes. "Instead he riffed on a Washington Times article."
Kobach has been accused in the past of implementing voter suppression tactics in Kansas. He was also fined for a "pattern" of "misleading the court" when it came to increasing voter ID restrictions in his state.
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