By
NICK GOSNELL
Hutch
Post
HUTCHINSON — The former Kansas Secretary of State and an adviser on election security to the Trump administration believes that mail in voting is not a good response to the COVID-19 pandemic, because there are several types of fraud that are possible with that type of voting.
"Double voting, where a person votes in two different states," Kris Kobach said. "We prosecuted many individuals who had double voted in Kansas and in another state. The second one is ballot harvesting. That's the kind of fraud we saw in North Carolina in 2018, where people collect other people's ballots and say I'm going to deliver them for you at the election office and then they only deliver some of them, because they calculate some ballots are for the candidate they don't like and so those ballots wind up in the trash can. Another type of fraud is voting someone else's ballot falsely, either intercepting it at the mailbox or falsely requesting it, on that person's behalf, to go to a different place."
There are states that have all mail in voting already, like Colorado, Washington and Oregon. Kobach says they are subject to another kind of fraud, because every voter on the rolls gets a ballot.
"There are, in any given state, thousands and in big states, hundreds of thousands of bad names on the voter rolls," Kobach said. "These are deceased individuals, duplicates, someone might be in the voter rolls under the name of Charles and Charlie, Bill and William and the names of people who have moved out of state."
Kobach believes that the solutions Kansas has put in for its absentee ballots make the process much more secure here.
"When you request a mail in ballot in Kansas, your signature is verified," Kobach said. "The county will check to see that your signature on the ballot request form matches the signature the state has on file. You have to send in a photocopy of a photo ID, or write your entire Kansas Driver's License number on the request form. We have effectively stopped these forms of fraud in Kansas."
Kobach will be on the ballot at least for the primary in August, as he is running to replace the retiring Pat Roberts in the United States Senate.