Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, reviewed a new Government Accountability Institute report on double voting in the 2016 election on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
Kobach said the report’s discovery of 8,471 double votes in 21 states was not surprising.
“In fact, I’m not even slightly surprised, because there are 30 states – and I haven’t checked to see if the GAI’s 20 states are the same as the 30 that I’m thinking of – that participate in what’s called the Interstate Cross-Check,” he said. “That’s these 30 states that are seriously concerned about keeping our voter clean. Kansas is the host of the program. We check our voter rolls against each other every year to find out who’s registered in more than one state, and we also find out who seems to be voting in more than one state.”
He added that some extra steps are needed to double-check apparently duplications based on the simple criteria that can be easily tested with computer scans, but thought the GAI count of 8,471 double votes “seems right in line with the kind of numbers we’re seeing among the 30 states in the Interstate Cross-Check program.”
“It is a big problem,” Kobach declared. “People double vote all the time.”
When Marlow noted double voting is a “serious crime,” Kobach responded, “Here’s the interesting part: voter fraud is a crime that is under-prosecuted, because in most states voter fraud is prosecutable only by the county attorney or the county district attorney, depending on how the state defines it.”
“They usually have a ton of cases on their desk for, you know, rape, arson, murder, and then they have this double voting case that comes along. It falls to the bottom of the stack, and most of them don’t get prosecuted,” he said.
“Kansas is different, because my office, the Secretary of State’s office, asked for prosecution authority from the legislature in 2015, and we got it,” Kobach noted. “In the last two years, we have prosecuted many cases of voter fraud, cases that the counties wouldn’t have gotten around to doing. Eight of the cases that we have prosecuted just in the last two years are double voting cases like these.”
“It is prosecutable. In our instances, we push for very heavy fines. In some instances, up to $5,000 fine for double voting,” he said.
Kobach agreed with Marlow’s observation that the left is not concerned about voter fraud, even as they spin elaborate media narratives about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“As we in Kansas have prosecuted our cases, the left-wing media here keeps saying, ‘Well, okay, sure, Kobach found some cases of voter fraud, but he didn’t find enough.’ Then we double up our number of cases prosecuted, and they still say ‘well, he didn’t find enough.’ They just shift their narrative from ‘voter fraud doesn’t exist’ to ‘well, there’s not enough voter fraud, let’s talk about something else,’” he said.
“But you’re absolutely right: in a close election, these instances of fraud can steal the election and shift the result,” Kobach told Marlow.
“One of the things about double voting is, at least from the experience we have looking at the cases we’ve prosecuted in Kansas, it can happen anywhere. It’s a crime of opportunity,” Kobach said.
“Someone realizes that they moved from, pick a state, they moved from Kansas to Ohio and they’re still registered in Kansas,” he elaborated. “They find out maybe because a piece of campaign literature is forwarded to them in Ohio, and they become tempted to say, ‘Well heck, maybe I can get away in this close election with voting twice.’ Unfortunately, in the majority of states that don’t aggressively prosecute this, they probably will get away with it, but not in Kansas.”
“Hopefully more states will begin taking this crime seriously because you only get one vote. Just because you registered in more than one state doesn’t mean you get to vote in more than one state in the same federal election,” he said.
Kobach said his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is currently sending out a letter to various secretaries of state, to follow up on the commission’s June 28 request for publicly available voter rolls.
“The commission was beset by liberal criticism, you may recall. In addition, seven lawsuits, one of which sought to stop the collection of this voter roll data,” he said. “Fortunately, the federal judge just ruled against those plaintiffs and said the commission may proceed with collecting the voter roll information. That is now occurring, starting yesterday, or starting today I should say, once the secretaries of state receive the letters.”
“That’s Step One. To look at things like double voting, you first have to see who’s registered in more than one state, and you have to see who’s voting in more than one state,” he explained. “I’m happy that the GAI did that analysis, because it confirms what I have been saying, and what other secretaries of state who care about voter fraud have been saying. This happens, and it actually happens quite a lot.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.
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