Alarmist voting rhetoric not helpful

NEW MEXICO Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver has been in the headlines recently for not turning the state’s voting rolls over to Kris Kobach’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Toulouse Oliver is in good company. Forty-four of the nation’s 50 secretaries of state are doing the same. Most of them, like Toulouse Oliver, cite state law on public disclosure of one or more of the data items Kobach is requesting. Most notable among these is none other that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach!

That’s the same Kris Kobach as the one who is requesting the information! It reads like a slapstick comedy script, but it’s not. It’s everyday life in public life in Donald Trump’s America.

Kobach has been crusading for years on what he claims is the urgent problem of voting by non-citizens. As secretary of state since 2011 in Kansas, he has been purging voting rolls and prosecuting voter fraud. He has a total of nine convictions, only one of a non-citizen, and mostly against retired citizens who own property in two states and have been confused about voter registration.

But this hasn’t stopped Kobach’s alarmist rhetoric. Ari Berman’s article in the June 13 New York Times Sunday Magazine tells of Kobach’s assertion before the Kansas Legislature that there are as many as 18,000 aliens on the Kansas voting rolls. The chamber erupted in laughter. Kobach has a talent for comedy that just won’t quit!

EDGAR ROMERO

Albuquerque