This article has been updated.
Writing for Breitbart, Kobach picks up a story from the Washington Times about voting in New Hampshire last year. That state has been a focus of voter-fraud conspiracy theories for two primary reasons: (1) It was close and (2) Trump didn’t win it. (In Michigan, a state he did win and where the percentage-point margin was even narrower, no one allied with Trump has raised a question at all. In fact, his lawyers asserted in a anti-recount lawsuit in that state that “all available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”)
New Hampshire has also been a focus of fraud allegations because it has same-day voter registration, allowing people to show up to a polling place to vote even if they hadn’t registered in advance. This is the focus of the Times piece, and of Kobach’s failing freshman logic paper at Breitbart.
The Times presents numbers released by the Republican speaker of the New Hampshire House, which we quote directly below:
- 6,540 people registered and voted on Nov. 8, based on presenting out-of-state licenses.
- As of Aug. 30, about 15 percent (1,014 of the voters) had been issued New Hampshire driver’s licenses.
- Οf the remaining 5,526, barely more than 200 (3.3 percent) had registered a motor vehicle in New Hampshire.
So: some 5,313 voters registered with out-of-state licenses but hadn’t then registered a car within 10 months.
Now, here’s Kobach:
“So 5,313 of those voters neither obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license nor registered a vehicle in New Hampshire. They have not followed the legal requirements for residents regarding driver’s licenses, and it appears that they are not actually residing in New Hampshire. It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.”
And then he’s off to the races: It’s likely that the results of the Senate race are tainted! It’s possible that New Hampshire’s electoral votes went illegally to Hillary Clinton!
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.
Update: Our Chris Ingraham noted an investigation by New Hampshire Public Radio from February in which they determined that most of those same-day registrations were in places that also were home to college campuses.
The state of New Hampshire has the personal information of these individuals to the point that they know if and when they registered cars. If the Republican legislature and governor would like to dig deeper and determine if any of those 5,000-plus people committed fraud, they certainly can. But since this claim has been made repeatedly, we already have any number of examples of people in the state saying that they’ve seen no evidence of fraud having occurred.
Kobach’s essay would have been troubling enough had it only run with the idea that the 2016 results were uncertain because 5,000 voters voted with out-of-state licenses. But there’s that phrase with which he kicked off his essay: “Now there’s proof.” Now, he wrote, there’s proof “that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and head to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes” — the numbers cited above. They are to proof what Jackson Pollock is to portraits: If you really want to see a face, you’ll see it.
Kobach is the vice-chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, working with the vice president of the United States. He is helping to lead a federal investigation into the integrity of the voting system — and he cites college kids at Dartmouth as “proof” that Hillary Clinton actually lost the state. 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. Instead he riffed on a Washington Times article.
This isn’t a game. Trump’s commission seems clearly designed to present fraud as a significant threat to the electoral system, a claim that’s belied by any number of studies, including one looking specifically at New Hampshire, and the lack of nearly any actual uncovered examples of it. (If millions voted illegally in California, as some have claimed, you’d have thought maybe one would have been caught.) The effect of the commission will invariably be to call for new legislation making it harder to vote. Such a law in Kansas meant that 34,000 fewer people voted in that state in 2012 than in 2008, with those affected skewing younger and less white. Read: More Democratic.
Kobach’s past behavior and other recent comments have suggested he’s inappropriate for his Trump-appointed role; this Breitbart essay makes that more clear. Incidentally, it was revealed recently that Kobach is compensated for his work at the conservative site. As a paid columnist, the logical leaps of that piece are questionable, much less as one of the two guys running an ostensibly objective look at if there is fraud in the system.
What I’m saying is that the arguments Kobach presents about fraud in New Hampshire — and I recognize the significance of what I’m about to write — should have been too far afield even for Breitbart. They are unquestionably too flawed for someone with the authority that President Trump has bestowed upon him.
This article was updated with Weigel’s reporting.