WICHITA, Kan. _ The top election official in Kansas asserted without evidence that millions of noncitizens voted in the presidential election moments after he certified the state's election results Wednesday.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who made his first public appearance since meeting with President-elect Donald Trump last week, backed Trump's claims that he would have won the popular vote if illegal votes were discounted.
"I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point," Kobach said immediately after he and other Kansas officials certified the state's election results.
Kobach pointed to a widely disputed study released by two Old Dominion University political scientists in 2014 that found that noncitizens voted at a rate of 11.3 percent in the 2008 election. The study has been rebutted repeatedly by other election scholars.
"If we apply that number to the current presidential election ... you'd have 3.2 million aliens voted in the presidential election and that far exceeds the current popular vote margin between President-elect Trump and Secretary Clinton," Kobach said.
Kobach said he had no tangible evidence to support that statement.
"This is the problem with aliens voting and registering. There's no way you can look at the voter rolls and say, 'This one's an alien, this one's a citizen,'" Kobach said. "Once a person gets on a voter roll, you don't have any way of easily identifying them as aliens so you have to rely on post-election studies."
Kobach also said he had no way to prove that the majority of noncitizens would have voted for Clinton rather than Trump, but said he could make that inference based on the candidate's policies.
"You're right. Can you necessarily conclude that all of them voted for Hillary Clinton? No. But you can probably conclude that a very high percentage voted for Hillary Clinton given the diametric opposite positions of the candidates on the immigration issue," Kobach said. "So let's assume 85 percent voted for Clinton."
Kobach has championed a Kansas law that requires voters to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, in order to register to vote. That law has faced numerous legal challenges.
Dale Ho, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Voting Rights Project, said in an email that the study Kobach is citing has been debunked. He noted that even one of its authors has said that it's not plausible that illegal votes would have tipped the popular vote in Clinton's favor.
"Kris Kobach's assertions about large numbers of noncitizens voting are patently false, and have been rejected repeatedly by federal courts," said Ho, who represented suspended voters in a case against Kansas' proof of citizenship law.
Ho pointed to the recent decision by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that Kobach could not require proof of citizenship of people who register at the DMV under the federal motor voter law. Judge Jerome Holmes, an appointee of President George W. Bush, called Kobach's argument about thousands of noncitizens potentially on Kansas voter rolls "pure speculation" in his opinion for the court.
A photograph of Kobach showed that when he met with Trump earlier in November he brought a plan for the Department of Homeland Security that included a reference to voter rolls.
Kobach, who advised Trump on immigration throughout the campaign, would not say Wednesday whether he was advising the president-elect to pursue a nationwide proof-of-citizenship requirement.
Trump began making the claims about illegal votes after Green Party candidate Jill Stein began an effort to hold recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three states that tipped the election in Trump's favor after he won them by a combined 114,000 votes.
Clinton has a lead in the national popular vote by more than 2 million votes.
Trump's spokesman, Jason Miller, pointed to the recount efforts earlier this week when asked about the president-elect's unsubstantiated claims regarding illegal voting.
"I really do think that it's been ridiculous that so much oxygen has been given to a recall effort with no chance of election results changing," Miller told reporters Monday. "The election results have been decided. It's also important that so much time and attention is going to be given to recount efforts."
Clay Barker, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, stopped short of supporting Kobach's claims of noncitizen voting Wednesday, saying: "I hear a lot of claims. I'm not sure what he's basing it on."
Kobach has repeatedly pointed to Sedgwick County to support his claim of widespread voter fraud and did again Wednesday.
Documents from Kobach's office show that 11 noncitizens became registered between 2003 and 2010. However, only three of them ever cast a ballot. Another 14 tried to register since 2013, but were blocked from doing so because of the proof of citizenship requirement.
Judges at both the state and federal level have called this insufficient evidence to support the need for Kobach's voting restrictions.
"Even when weighed against the 25 Sedgwick County individuals identified by the Defendant who attempted to register to vote over a period of 13 years, the denial of more than 18,000 individuals' right to vote far eclipses the Defendant's demonstrated _ and undeniable _ interest in a secure election," wrote Shawnee County Judge Larry Hendricks this month when he ruled that Kobach lacked the authority to set up a tiered voting system.
