Before Trump Tweets, Appeals Court Doubted Concerns About Illegal Immigrant Voting
Speculation that vast numbers of illegal immigrants are on voter rolls isn’t just coming from President-elect Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
A similar concern was aired by Republican Kansas officials in a recent case before skeptical federal appeals court judges weighing a Kansas law requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration at state DMV offices.
Mr. Trump’s tweeted Sunday that he had won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
No evidence has emerged of widespread voting by illegal immigrants. That lack of evidence has been a major factor weighing against Kansas as it’s sought to defend the proof-of-citizenship mandate.
The American Civil Liberties Union this year sued the state over the law, which requires people registering to vote while applying for a driver’s license to show documentary proof of citizenship. The suit alleged the law was preventing thousands of otherwise qualified Kansas residents “from exercising their fundamental right to vote.”
After a federal judge temporarily barred enforcement of the law, lawyers for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach took the case to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing in a brief:
The threat of noncitizens registering to vote in Kansas is not hypothetical. As explained above, evidence from just one of Kansas’s 105 counties demonstrated that prior to K.S.A. § 25-2309(l) going into effect, eleven noncitizens successfully registered to vote; and after it went into effect another fourteen were prevented from registering. These 25 cases are just the tip of the iceberg in Sedgwick County. And when all 105 counties are considered, the number of aliens on the voter rolls is likely to be in the hundreds, if not thousands.
The appeals court wasn’t convinced of an iceberg lurking beneath those couple-dozen examples and refused to undo the injunction. Wrote 10th Circuit Judge Jerome A. Holmes, a President George W. Bush appointee, in an October-issued opinion:
[W]e reject as based on conjecture Secretary Kobach’s invitation to consider as “just the tip of the iceberg” the twenty-five cases in Sedgwick County of aliens registering or attempting to register. The assertion that the “number of aliens on the voter rolls is likely to be in the hundreds, if not thousands” is pure speculation….
On the other side of the equation is the near certainty that without the preliminary injunction over 18,000 U.S. citizens in Kansas will be disenfranchised for purposes of the 2016 federal elections—elections less than one month away.
Though the Kansas law was blocked leading up to the November election, it hasn’t been struck down for good. In late October, following 10th Circuit orders, U.S. District Judge Julie A. Robinson of Kansas City allowed the state to take three months to conduct a statistical analysis that would more precisely determine how many noncitizens are on Kansas’s registration rolls.
