• Home
  • Independent Voter News
  • Quizzes
  • Election Dissection
  • Sections
  • Events
  • Directory
  • About Us
  • Glossary
  • Opinion
  • Campaign Finance
  • Redistricting
  • Civic Ed
  • Voting
  • Fact Check
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. Voting>
  3. voter registration>

Citizenship proof to vote is unconstitutional absent viable fraud, appeals court says

David Hawkings
April 30, 2020
Senate candidate Kris Kobach

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach Kobach said the decision is the "essence of judicial activism."

Kansas may not require people registering to vote to provide documents proving their citizenship, a federal appeals court has ruled, striking down one of the most prominent Republican efforts to prove assertions of widespread election cheating.

The law was enacted in 2013 at the behest of Kris Kobach, the polarizing GOP figure who was then the state's top elections official and went on to chair President Trump' s commission to investigate voter fraud, which disbanded after coming up nearly empty.

Wednesday's ruling could bolster the prospects for other lawsuits by progressive groups and the Democrats. They are challenging election laws in more than a dozen states, many of them 2020 battlegrounds, arguing many rules were designed by conservative legislators to suppress the votes of racial minorities, college students and other reliably Democratic voters on the pretext of outsmarting an army of fraudsters that doesn't actually exist.


"Kansas wasn't able to muster evidence that the law in question here was necessary to prevent voter fraud, and I think that broader principle could have reverberations beyond the specific context of this case in a wide range of disputes over voting access between now and November," said Dale Ho, the American Civil Liberties Union's top voting rights lawyer.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Top GOP officials in Kansas said they may ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision, in which the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded the statute violated the Constitution's equal protection guarantee and the federal law regulating voter registration.

In the past two decades, the court said, 67 noncitizens at most registered or tried to register in Kansas — concluding that "incredibly slight evidence" of misbehavior was "statistically indistinguishable from zero" and did not justify preventing more than 31,000 applicants from registering, disenfranchising them during the five years the law was being enforced. (It has been blocked since 2018 because of the litigation.)

The state's interest in preventing such minimal fraud, the three-judge panel unanimously concluded, does "not justify the burden imposed on the right to vote."

The Kansas law is unique in requiring people to show a physical document such as a birth certificate or passport when applying to register. The state argued that is not too much of a burden and would assure the integrity of the voter rolls.

Mississippi is the only other state requiring would-be voters to similarly prove their citizenship, and that law only applies to naturalized Americans. It is being challenged in a separate federal lawsuit.

Kobach derided the decision as the "essence of judicial activism" and urged an appeal by his successor as secretary of state, Scott Schwab. He and Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a fellow Republican, said they were considering doing so.

The Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, has no say in the matter but urged them to give up. "If we have a problem with voting in the state of Kansas and across the country, it is that not enough people exercise their right," she said in a statement. "So I think eliminating any barriers to voting is a good thing."

Kobach, who was upset by Kelly in a bid for governor in 2018, is now seeking the state's open Senate seat in a competitive Republican primary.

"Make no mistake — this is a huge victory," said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of "Election Meltdown," a sharp critique of the American electoral system.

The case produced "the most important voting trial of the 21st century so far because it was the chance for those like Kobach who claim that voter fraud is a major problem in the United States to prove that in a court of law under the rules of evidence, "The proof was woefully inadequate."

From Your Site Articles
  • GOP crusade to curb voting runs into blockade in Kansas - The Fulcrum ›
  • GOP crusade to curb voting runs into blockade in Kansas - The Fulcrum ›
voter registration
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Follow
Contributors

But what can I do?

Pedro Silva

Are large donor networks still needed to win in a fairer election system?

Paige Chan

Independent voters want to be heard. Is anybody listening?

David Thornburgh
John Opdycke

The U.S. has been seeking the center since the days of Teddy Roosevelt

Dave Anderson

Imperfection and perseverance

Jeff Clements

We’ve expanded the Supreme Court before. It’s time to do so again.

Anushka Sarkar
latest News

Americans want action on gun control, but the Senate can’t move forward

David Meyers
17h

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Our Staff
23h

Nearly 20 states have restricted private funding of elections

David Meyers
24 May

Video: Will Trump run in 2024?

Our Staff
24 May

The state of voting: May 23, 2022

Our Staff
23 May

Trump looms large over Tuesday’s primaries

Richard Perrins
23 May
Videos

Video: Helping loved ones divided by politics

Our Staff

Video: What happened in Virginia?

Our Staff

Video: Infrastructure past, present, and future

Our Staff

Video: Beyond the headlines SCOTUS 2021 - 2022

Our Staff

Video: Should we even have a debt limit

Our Staff

Video: #ListenFirstFriday Yap Politics

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: Did economists move the Democrats to the right?

Our Staff
02 May

Podcast: The future of depolarization

Our Staff
11 February

Podcast: Sore losers are bad for democracy

Our Staff
20 January

Deconstructed Podcast from IVN

Our Staff
08 November 2021
Recommended
people talking

But what can I do?

Leveraging big ideas
Shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas

Americans want action on gun control, but the Senate can’t move forward

Congress
Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Big Picture
First-ever majority-female New York city council

Are large donor networks still needed to win in a fairer election system?

Campaign Finance
Independent voters want to be heard. Is anybody listening?

Independent voters want to be heard. Is anybody listening?

Voting
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg

Nearly 20 states have restricted private funding of elections

State