Widows, Please Stop Making The Kansas Secretary Of State Sad With Your Vote-Frauding All The Time

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is branching out from hating immigrants (he helped draft Arizona's "papers please" immigration law), and is now touting the virtues of the state's restrictive voter ID law, which requires people to present their birth certificate or other proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The measure has left some 19,000 voters disenfranchised, but that's OK, because they're just "procrastinators" who wouldn't get their butts in gear and verify they deserve to vote, is all. And now, Kobach is pushing another good reason to make voter ID laws as restrictive as possible:  imaginary voter fraud by widows, who apparently are addicted to voting for their dead husbands.

RightWingWatch has the scoop, as they so often do: Kobach was appearing at an event for the anti-immigrant crowd FAIR Wednesday, chatting onstage with yet another wingnut radio host you've never heard of, Joyce Kaufman. And then Kobach explained how, since sometimes people's names stay on the voter rolls even when they're dead, it's really easy for their widows -- no he doesn't explain why only women do this -- to vote in their names, because apparently people at the polls just say, "Oh, sure thing!" whenever someone asks for a second ballot, please, or there's a thriving trade in faked absentee ballots for dead people.

Kaufman: I can’t imagine how many widows are voting for their dead husbands in communities like I lived in.

Kobach: Yeah, it happens all the time. There are basically three sources of people on our voter rolls who are not supposed to be there. One is people who die and they stay on the voter rolls. The other is people who have moved out of state, but they’re on the rolls in both states. And the third is aliens, people who were never entitled to vote in the first place. And we’re trying to do something about in Kansas, but you can imagine how the folks on the left complain and say, ‘Well, you can’t do that.’ Well, yeah we can do that and we’re going to do that.

Kaufman: And it’s not bigoted.

Kobach: It’s not at all!

Of course it isn't bigoted. Well, except against dead people. And never mind that the amount of actual vote fraud is vanishingly small, in every study ever done, Kobach is going to make damned sure that those sneaky widows stay on the up and up.

And just to make sure he filled in all the spaces on his wingnut cliché bingo card, Kobach added that only a big old racist would suggest that voter ID laws are aimed at minorities, just because the evidence says they are:

“You’re telling me that because of a person’s skin color, he’s less able to find his birth certificate?” he asked. “That’s just crazy to make that argument.”

And then a whole bunch of fans of Voter ID flocked to FreeRepublic's post about the passing of Barack Obama's aunt to joke that she'll be voting Democrat and collecting food stamps for years to come.

[ RightWingWatch ]