In November 2016, after Donald Trump had issued his feeble lie that millions of illegal ballots cost him the popular vote, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach came to the aid of the president-elect’s damaged pride. Trump, said Kobach, was “absolutely correct” about the existence of these phantom voters.
Kobach, who led Trump’s seedy, now-defunct commission on voter “integrity,” has been performing voter-fraud shtick in public for years. But the Yale Law School graduate proved spectacularly out of his depth in a federal courtroom, where evidence is the currency of the realm.
“The Kobach trial shows that talk is cheap, and when incendiary claims are actually put on trial, oftentimes they can fall apart,” emailed election law expert Richard Hasen, author of “The Voting Wars” and a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.