Six years ago Kris Kobach and myself were on strikingly different warpaths. Kobach had just launched his campaign for Kansas Secretary of State. I was earning my combat stripes and Afghan Campaign Medal in the desert valleys of Kandahar. There, I was fighting the Taliban, an enemy that – ironically – as a young man, Kris Kobach had advocated arming. An ambitious college kid, Kobach told his student newspaper “the Afghan rebels’ cause gets the least amount of attention and support in this country”. Many of those rebels soon became the Taliban – and are still at war with America today after training and harboring the terrorists that attacked us on September 11th killing more than 3,000 and sparking the longest war in American history.
But in 2009, my first mission in Afghanistan was straightforward, if not a simple task. We were there to foster the safe and free elections of the Afghan people. To give them a shot at enjoying the democracy that we treasure. Meanwhile, the mission Kris Kobach took on back here in Kansas was neither straightforward nor simple – he was out convince Kansans that voter fraud was common, rampant, and widespread, despite the lack of any evidence suggesting it.
It was startling to return home to Kansas in 2012 and learn what our new Secretary of State was up to. He wasn’t expanding access to democracy, or empowering people to vote, as we’d been fighting the Taliban to do in Afghanistan. Instead, he’d embarked on a campaign of intimidation and suppression.
Unfortunately, this only accelerated this past summer, when Governor Brownback signed into law everything that Kobach asked for. Senate Bill 34 gave the Kansas Secretary of State authority to prosecute voters. Kobach has pursued only three alleged cases of fraud to date, hardly the massive epidemic of fraud that he claimed was marring our elections. But in addition to his use of this the prosecutorial authority, Secretary Kobach has begun purging over 37,000 Kansans from the books who have failed to obey his rules – Kansans who in fact should have every right to vote. But instead of working to expand the access of Kansans to their right to vote, Kris Kobach is on the warpath to deny it to them.
According to recent news reports, many of these folks are active military personnel and veterans. And when contacted, they had no idea they were being denied their right to vote – or what they needed to do to maintain that right. It’s not the first time Kobach has used his office in a way that undermines the vote of our service members. Just last fall Kobach mailed out a letter to military members overseas, claiming their votes may not count due to pending lawsuits about Chad Taylor withdrawing from the U.S. Senate race. There was really no reason to do that mailing, except to try and diminish their likelihood of voting by making them feel like their votes wouldn’t count.
In only 6 years Kobach has transformed an effective, transparent Kansas Elections Office into one constantly marred by controversy. Data on election results has never been harder to come by. Free and fair elections have always been what makes American democracy exceptional – so sacrificing 37,000 voter registrants to try to prosecute 3 Kansans who may have accidentally voted in multiple states out of confusion or negligence is jarringly at odds with the foundations of our democracy. And while those three votes certainly didn’t change the outcome of any elections, unfortunately, Secretary Kobach’s voter intimidation tactics just might.
It’s relevant and important this Veterans Day. Kansans who have fought for freedom abroad – and who have monitored elections in parts of the world that had never voted before – are now finding themselves being potentially denied the right to vote at home. It’s an unacceptable treatment of any Kansan, but it’s a particularly unacceptable treatment of our patriots. We need accountability from this politician, and an end to these attacks on our fellow Kansans’ democratic rights.
Aaron Estabrook is a post 9/11 combat veteran and vice-president of the USD 383 Manhattan-Ogden Board of Education.