After a year in which voting lines proved to be a much bigger problem than alleged voter fraud, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) is gaining traction for his proposal to give himself more power to prosecute such cases. The power to investigate and charge individuals in cases of alleged election fraud now rests with local criminal prosecutors. But under a bill that has now passed in different forms in both houses of the state legislature, that power would be moved to Kobach’s office. The Associated Press reports:

The secretary of state is Kansas’ chief elections official but must refer cases of potential election irregularities to county and federal prosecutors if criminal charges are to be pursued. Even the state attorney general’s office must consult with local prosecutors on such cases.

Kobach said county prosecutors have too many other criminal cases to handle to pursue election fraud allegations aggressively, and the attorney general’s office also has “a very full plate.” He said the secretary of state’s office is most likely to pursue election fraud allegations aggressively and develop expertise in investigating them. [...]

Rep. Jan Pauls, a Hutchinson Democrat, said if legislators want a state official to have the specific authority to prosecute election fraud cases, it should go to the attorney general’s office.

“The AG should be in control of all the prosecutions, or the local district and county attorneys,” she said. “It’s nice to have everybody’s role stay the same as it has been traditionally.”

Kobach’s critics also contend that he’s overstated the potential for election abuses both in pushing for expanded authority for his office and successfully pursuing the photo ID and proof-of-citizenship laws in Kansas. Election fraud prosecutions have been relatively few over the past decade, and the state has about 1.7 million registered voters.

But Kobach argues that Kansas appears to have few cases because election irregularities aren’t pursued aggressively. He said his office has found at least 30 cases from the 2012 election in which the name and birthdate of someone who voted in Kansas matched the name and birthdate of someone who voted in another state, suggesting illegal, double voting.

Nationwide, voter fraud is an exceedingly rare occurrence, and Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. When Kobach ran on a platform to fight voter fraud in 2010, investigations found that Kobach’s claims were vastly overstated. Over the course of a five-year period, there had only been seven cases of alleged voter fraud at the local, state, and federal law, and just one of those incidents had been prosecuted. When Kobach floated this bill to assume prosecutorial power last year, a Democratic state representative who questioned Kobach’s slate of potential voter fraud cases found that most of them concerned snow birds who live half the year in Kansas and half elsewhere and may end up registering in two places with no ill intent. ”I can’t wait for him to drag some snowbird off to jail,” Rep. Ann Mah said. Nonetheless, Kobach has continued to tout strict voter ID laws and greater state resources pumped into combating this alleged problem.

Moving prosecutions to Kobach’s office could lead to politicized criminal charges. A former advisor to Mitt Romney, Kobach been a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, and is known for having helped to draft Arizona’s controversial and partially invalidated immigration law, SB 1070, and as a top proponent of strict voter ID laws that disproportionately disfranchise minorities. Kobach was previously counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, the legal arm of an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This year, with more conservative Republicans replacing moderates in the state legislature, the bill seems poised to pass if the houses can reconcile the two versions, as expected, and gain Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) signature.

Left: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R). Right: State Rep. Ponka-We Victors (D).

A Native American state representative in Kansas rebuked Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, at a hearing yesterday.

“I think it’s funny Mr. Kobach, because when you mention illegal immigrant, I think of all of you,” said State Rep. Ponka-We Victors (D), a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation of Arizona, during a hearing on Wednesday about a state statute that allows children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at public universities. Her comments drew loud applause from the audience.

The Topeka Capital-Journal has more:

Wednesday’s hearing on House Bill 2192 would have repealed a nearly 10-year-old statute that allows students who graduate from Kansas high schools and have lived in Kansas for at least three years to pay in-state tuition at state universities and community colleges, regardless of residency status.

Kobach, a lightning-rod for controversy on immigration issues, told the committee federal law conflicts with that statute.

“U.S. citizens should always come first when it comes to handing out government subsidies,” Kobach said.

Kobach, author of anti-immigrant state laws like SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama, is a central figure in the conservative push to oppose immigration reform. He served as an advisor on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 and continues to fight for stricter laws in Kansas and around the country.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach backs harmful immigration measures in the state.

Even though several strict immigration bills stalled in the Kansas legislature last year, legislators are expected to consider harmful immigration measures again this year. And after more conservative GOPers replaced several moderate Republican senators in the 2012 election, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the anti-immigrant official who wrote Arizona’s and Alabama’s extreme immigration laws, said he thinks state lawmakers will pass at least one of the anti-immigrant bills, according to the Wichita Eagle.

The Kansas legislature likely will consider four bills:

• One requires “state and local governments, and possibly private businesses, to vet employees through an electronic database;”
• another would mandate that “local law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people they come in contact with,” if the they suspect the person is undocumented;
• another bill “would prohibit any public benefits from going to anyone here illegally;”
• the final bill tries to undo a 2004 Kansas law that allows undocumented immigrants to qualify for in-state tuition at state colleges.

Kobach said Kansas’ in-state tuition bill turned Kansas into “the sanctuary state of the Midwest” and that extreme immigration measures would force undocumented immigrants to self-deport, leaving jobs for unemployed Kansans. But Janeth Vazquez, communications coordinator for Wichita-based Sunflower Community Action, a pro-immigration reform group, said undocumented immigrants contribute more in taxes. And without immigrant workers, farmers in Western Kansas could suffer if they do not have enough workers — just like farmers in Alabama and Georgia after those states passed extreme self-deportation measures.

Even some Republicans are unsure of the harmful bills being floated ahead of the state legislative session that begins in two weeks. Michael O’Neal, the outgoing Republican speaker of the House and now president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber opposes forcing employers to get rid of hard-working employees because of their immigration status. “It turns good people into ones who will commit fraud to get a job and keep a job,” he said.

Last year, Kansas Agriculture Secretary Dale Rodman sought a waiver from the federal government so that companies could hire undocumented workers, but Kobach dismissed any type of what he called state-level amnesty as illegal. “You might as well pass a law saying all Kansans should sprout wings and fly,” he said.

But while state officials and anti-immigrant conservatives may want to push for more extreme state laws, it’s clear that a comprehensive immigration reform plan that offers a path to citizenship would benefit all states by increasing the nation’s GDP and tax revenue. Congress needs to pass a law in order to address the issue nationally instead of continuing to have states pass their own immigration laws.

Almost one month after young undocumented immigrants began applying for deferred action, federal immigration officials announced that about 72,000 DREAM Act-eligible young adults have applied so far. The new policy, which President Obama announced in June, gives undocumented immigrants who qualify two-year deportation deferrals and permits to legally work in the U.S.

Officials in the Department of Homeland Security have worked quickly to process applications as they have poured in, with California leading in the number of applications from undocumented immigrants in that state. The largest portion of deferred action applicants were born in Mexico, but immigration officials said a large number also came from South Koreans, who make up a much smaller population of immigrants in the U.S.

Republicans, however, are renewing their attacks against the program. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) questioned “the speed at which the deferrals are being granted” in a letter to John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, on Tuesday and back in August, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an informal immigration adviser to Mitt Romney, filed a lawsuit challenging the policy. Kobach is representing 10 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees who disagree with the directive. “It places ICE agents in an untenable position where their political superiors are ordering them to violate federal law,” Kobach said.

Mitt Romney has not explained if he would continue the deferred action policy as president — although one of his advisers said Romney would end it — but at this rate, the New York Times estimates that at least 200,000 people potentially could have applied for deferred action by the presidential election in November.

Of all the GOP candidates, Mitt Romney staked out the most extreme immigration positions during the Republican primary. He said his immigration plan would be to make undocumented immigrants “self-deport,” and he vowed to veto the DREAM Act. Since he effectively locked up the nomination, however, Romney tried to distance himself from his earlier hardline stances, and a Republican Party official even tried to claim that Romney is “still deciding what his position on immigration is.”

But Romney is still losing among Latino voters by an enormous (and widening) margin. While Romney has tried to moderate his immigration views from the primary to the general election, his immigration advisers and supporters still include extremely anti-immigrant officials.

KRIS KOBACH

Currently serving as Kansas’ secretary of state, Kobach is the author of harmful state and local anti-immigrant ordinances like those in Arizona, Alabama, and South Carolina. He wrote the vast majority of them as senior counselor to the restrictionist Immigration Reform Law Institute and as a private consultant. He has insisted that Romney wants SB 1070 as a national model, and he doesn’t expect Romney to soften the extreme immigration positions he took during the GOP primary. And following President Obama’s directive to halt deportations for up to 1.4 million young undocumented immigrants, Kobach called the policy “illegal.” Kobach advised Romney’s 2008 campaign on immigration and homeland security, and he returned to that role for the 2012 election after he endorsed the GOP presidential candidate in January. In April, Romney tried to distance himself from Kobach while softening his immigration positions, saying he was a “supporter,” not an “adviser” before conceding that Kobach was still an “informal adviser.”

PETE WILSON

After the former Republican California governor endorsed Romney, the presidential candidate named Wilson honorary California chair of his campaign. In a statement touting the endorsement, Romney said, “I’m honored to have Governor Pete Wilson’s support, because he’s one of California’s most accomplished leaders.” As governor of California, Wilson prominently supported Proposition 187, an anti-immigrant ballot initiative that made unauthorized immigrants ineligible for public services such as health care or public education. California voters approved the measure in 1994, a precursor to Arizona’s SB 1070, before courts declared it unconstitutional in 1997.

RUSSELL PEARCE

The former Arizona Senate president, who was ousted in a recall election, was the architect of Arizona’s infamous SB 1070. He threw his support behind Romney and said that the GOP presidential candidate’s “immigration policy is identical to mine.” And Pearce said Romney “absolutely” called for Arizona’s law to be used as a national “model” because Romney has advocated for self-deportation. “[Self-deportation] is in SB 1070,” Pearce said in April.

JAN BREWER

Citing only Romney’s “pro-business background” and his “political history,” Arizona’s nativist Republican governor endorsed Romney ahead of her state’s primary in February. Brewer is one of the nation’s most anti-immigrant governors, and she signed SB 1070, the first of a wave of anti-immigrant bills authored by Kobach.

RAY WALSER

After President Obama announced the directive to halt deportations for DREAM Act-eligible young adults, Romney refused to say whether or not he would undo the policy. But Walser, a co-chair of Romney’s campaign for issues pertaining to Latin America, said he thought Romney would get rid of it. “My anticipation is that he would probably rescind this directive were he to be elected in November,” he told The Daily Telegraph. He added that the decision would match up with the “very tough” positions Romney had taken on immigration. Walser is a senior policy adviser at the Heritage Foundation who spent 27 years working for the U.S. State Department.

LAMAR SMITH

The Texas Republican, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, became one of Romney’s earliest congressional endorsers in October 2011, choosing to back the former Massachusetts governor over Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Smith has pledged to not hold a hearing on the DREAM Act in his hearing, which Romney vowed to veto.