New York Times
By John Eligon
February 18, 2016
In
a test of Kansas’ wide-ranging voter registration law, a federal
lawsuit filed on Thursday challenged a provision that required residents
to provide proof of citizenship
when they register to vote.
The
lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, takes aim at a
measure that was pushed through the Republican-led Legislature five
years ago by Secretary of
State Kris W. Kobach, who has lobbied heavily for measures that he said
were needed to prevent noncitizens from voting.
The
A.C.L.U., saying that fraud claims were unfounded, brought the
class-action suit on behalf of six Kansas residents who said they were
left off the voter rolls after
registering at the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
The
plaintiffs argue that the Kansas law violated the National Voter
Registration Act of 1993, in particular a provision that requires states
to allow people to register
to vote when they get a driver’s license. That section says that
registrants need only to attest that they are citizens, under the threat
of perjury if they lie.
Mr.
Kobach said the A.C.L.U. was misinterpreting federal law, which
requires only that states accept voter registration applications at the
Department of Motor Vehicles
— not that those applications have to be confirmed at that time.
“The
state has every right to verify that the person is eligible to vote
before completing the person’s registration,” said Mr. Kobach, who is a
national leader in the
push for stricter immigration laws. He was one of the authors of a
controversial law passed in Arizona in 2010 that allowed law enforcement
officers to question the immigration status of people they believe to
be in the country illegally.
Registrations
cannot be confirmed during the driver’s license process, he said,
because some of the information cannot be immediately verified by motor
vehicle officials.
For example, he said, they cannot tell if applicants have felony
records, or if they were already registered in another county.
Most
of the controversy over voter identification laws around the country
has focused on those that require voters to present identification when
they arrive to vote.
Kansas, however, is one of four states requiring proof of citizenship when residents register.
Two
of the states, Georgia and Alabama, have yet to implement their laws,
said Dale Ho, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project. The
A.C.L.U. has not seen
the same registration issues in the other state, Arizona, as it has in
Kansas.
The
Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s law in 2013, in a 7-2 ruling in
which Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion. At the time,
Mr. Kobach, a Republican,
argued that Kansas’ law was different from Arizona’s because Arizona
was rejecting voter registrations that were not accompanied by proof of citizenship. Kansas, on the other hand, would still accept such
applications, Mr. Kobach said, but placed them “in
suspense” until the proof of citizenship was provided.
Later
in 2013, the two states sued the federal government to allow them to
set up what was essentially a two-tiered voting system in which their
residents could vote in
federal elections if they did not have proof of citizenship documents,
but not in state races. The states initially won the case when a federal
judge in Wichita sided with them, but that decision was later
overturned by an appellate court.
The
A.C.L.U. also sued Kansas in state court over the two-tiered voting
system. Last month, a state judge sided with the A.C.L.U., but Mr.
Kobach is appealing the decision.
Since
the Kansas law took effect in 2013, more than 35,000 registrations have
been in suspense, according to the lawsuit, about 14 percent of
registrations filed during
that period. More than 44 percent of the people whose application were
put in suspense were ages of 18 to 29 and nearly 54 percent were
unaffiliated with a party. Mr. Kobach said that there are now fewer than
11,000 applications in suspense. Some of those
applications had been approved after further documentation was
provided, he said, and others had been thrown out because they had been
on file for more than 90 days.
The
A.C.L.U. is also challenging Mr. Kobach’s decision to start throwing
out registrations that have been in suspense for at least 90 days. About
12,000 have been purged,
according to the lawsuit, though Mr. Kobach challenged the accuracy of
that figure, saying his office has not calculated that number. Paul
Davis, a Democrat and the former State House minority leader who ran an
unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2014, filed
his own federal lawsuit last year, challenging the purging of the voter
rolls. That case is pending.
Mr.
Kobach said it was misleading to say that registrations were being
purged because the people whose voter applications were in suspense had
never officially been registered
to vote.
The
lawsuit also says that Kansas’ administration of the law was a
bureaucratic mess. Some people who had shown proof of citizenship while
registering were placed on the
suspense list, including three of the plaintiffs, the lawsuit said.
Mr.
Kobach challenged that assertion. There were some technical glitches in
the early days of the law, but those have long since been resolved, he
said.
“The D.M.V. is transferring records to the county election officers in a systematic way and on a regular basis,” he said.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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