Is Trump's Voter Fraud Vice-Chair Stealing an Election?

Last year Donald Trump created a commission to look into voter fraud, but it was disbanded without doing anything. The commission had asked the states to give the federal government sensitive voter information, and all the states had refused to hand over the data because it violated privacy laws.

That included Kansas, where the vice-chair of the commission, Chris Kobach, is secretary of state, where his duties include overseeing elections.

The commission worked for months trying to prove that there was some sort of systemic vote rigging, but they could find only a minuscule number of cases of intentional fraud, and most of those were Trump voters pulling one scam or another.

Kobach is now running for governor of Kansas, and is locked a primary battle that has yet to be decided. The two candidates are separated by a few hundred votes.

Immediately after the primary suspicious things were happening with the vote totals. County totals tallied locally didn't match county totals entered by Kobach's employees, giving Kobach hundreds of extra votes.

Kobach recused himself on Friday, but his deputy, Eric Rucker, a political appointee, is running the show.

Rucker is making decisions that favor Kobach: he's telling poll workers to throw out provisional ballots cast by unaffiliated voters, after those voters were instructed to cast provisional ballots by poll workers.

He's also trying to throw out mailed-in ballots that were received the day after the election because they don't have postmarks. “The thing that really ticks us off is that for all intents and purposes, it’s the Postal Service that’s disenfranchised that voter. And shame on them.”

No, this hack is trying to disenfranchise voters and throw the election to Kobach. None of Kobach's partisan hires should be making decisions in this election. They have inherent conflicts of interest, and they should recuse themselves.

This episode illustrates the real kind of voter fraud that occurs in this country: legislators who make confusing laws and place onerous restriction on voters, poll workers who may or may not intentionally give voters bad advice casting their votes, and government officials who preferentially discard absentee and provisional ballots based on whether they will swing the election their way.