(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers Oct. 3, 2016)
It’s made for a lot of news stories—though we’re betting they probably didn’t crowd the advertisements out of your local newspaper—this citizenship-voter business in Kansas.
And it might finally be over…if the Secretary of State and the ACLU can get a federal judge to agree to the wording of a letter to thousands of Kansans that they sure enough can vote in November and that the election folk are going to count those votes.
It has taken more than a year and who knows how much money for Secretary of State Kris Kobach to try to enforce a law that the Legislature probably shouldn’t have passed and the governor probably shouldn’t have signed into law that requires proof of U.S. Citizenship for people to vote in Kansas.
It was a couple years ago that someone thought it was a good idea to have just documented American citizens voting on the people who run the nation, the state, the county, city and drainage district in which we live.
That proof of citizenship requirement probably meant that thousands of Kansans either had to dig through mom’s storage closet to find a birth certificate to prove they were born here, or maybe locate a passport if you are a foreign traveler or a citizenship certificate if you were born in another country.
The Kobach-American Civil Liberties Union agreement on a form letter letting those folks who don’t readily have, or maybe don’t know how to secure, a birth certificate that they can vote will end the turmoil.
That federal court decision also does away with Kobach’s proposal for a dual ballot system. While federal law doesn’t require proof of citizenship to vote on federal races, the now overridden Kansas law does require proof to vote on state and local issues. Kobach’s idea? You could vote on federal offices, but not Kansas offices or issues without that proof of citizenship.
Sounds a little strange that if you can vote for the president you can’t vote for a Trego County commissioner, but that’s the way Kobach wanted it.
Now essentially stricken down, it means that probably about 18,000 Kansans now can spend the time in the booth to vote for everything on the ballot, federal and state and local, the whole works.
What’s it all mean?
Finally, if you are a Kansan, and we know who we are, you get full voting privileges. We gotta figure that if some foreign nationals somehow made it across the U.S. border, and found their way here to live, then they can vote.
That issue apparently settled, we now get to speculate how many of those new, full-ballot voters are actually going to vote in the November election.
Lots of those folks registered to vote when they got new driver’s licenses and registered without having to show citizenship. And, there are federal election registration forms that don’t require proof.
Now, are those folks going to vote? Nobody’s sure. Kobach estimates that statewide, after a county court judge issued a temporary ruling just the Friday before the primary election that they could vote the whole ballot, only 73 of those affected Kansans actually bothered to make the drive in to vote.
With more than a month’s notice now—and that letter that is still being parsed out—there may be thousands of Kansans who will be officially notified that they can vote on everything, and that trip to the polling place will actually be worth the gas.
With that vote-denying business out of the way, we gotta wonder what’s next?
Did we hear someone in the halls of the Statehouse mutter about that other registration duty of the Secretary of State? Wonder if there’s a majority of a quorum of legislators and the governor passing a law that requires notaries to be right-handed, or weigh at least 150 pounds?
We’ll see…