Kansas Secretary of State and Gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach has been under a lot of fire lately. Accepting a job at Brietbart, going to court representing a Utah company as a private attorney in Kansas, His role within ALEC, and his controversial role as one of the lead’s on Trump’s voter suppression panel.
It is that last job that has started a unique argument: in order to avoid fulfilling open records requests, Secretary of State Kobach is effectively arguing that his role in handling the way voter management is done is not part of the office, but just him as a private citizen. Let’s just say not everyone is buying the claim.
www.kansascity.com/…
“The question about the private email is not as important as whether or not Kobach is acting as the secretary of state,” said Max Kautsch, a Lawrence attorney who specializes in First Amendment and open government issues.
Kautsch, who served on a special state panel that crafted the legislation, called the notion that Kobach, the state’s top election official, was serving on the voting commission as a private citizen “obviously totally insane.” He said Kobach would be highly vulnerable to lawsuits.
There are two components at play here. The secretary of state contends he serves on the panel as a private citizen. Earlier in the process of the voter suppression commission, Kobach alarmed states by requesting data that there were concerns he didn’t have a right to have.
www.cnn.com/…
A Trump administration letter requesting data from all 50 state's voting rolls has put some states and voting rights advocates on edge after many were already wary of the aims of the President's commission on voting.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity's vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, sent a
letter to each state Wednesday asking a series of questions soliciting feedback about election administration, voter fraud and the integrity of the process. CNN obtained a copy of the letter sent to Maine's secretary of state.
Kobach also requested that each state provide "publicly available voter roll data" as allowed under each state's laws, which could include full names of registered voters, dates of birth, party registration, last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting history.
In order to avoid open record act requests, Kobach asserts that all of his work is being done through private email, and he serves as a private citizen. This makes his earlier requests for data even more problematic. If he is on the commission without any ethical strings as required by his office as Secretary of State, and he serves only as he wishes as a private citizen, his prior requests for a lot of private data give citizens absolutely no ability to check up on what he plans to do with this data. It sounds almost like a heist movie — “let me take all of your data and you have no protections as to what I will do with it”.
The second problem is that this claim may still fall outside of the bounds of Kansas Open Records Act requests (KORA).
Bryan Lowry and Hunter Woodall at the Kansas City Star nail the story:
www.kansascity.com/...
“This is why the law was changed, so that officials can’t come up with reasons for keeping the public in the dark that aren’t credible,” Kautsch said.
If Kobach is serving on the commission in his official capacity as Kansas secretary of state, then all of his emails related to the commission would be available to the public under the 2016 law. The May announcement from the White House on the formation of the commission noted his position as Kansas secretary of state.
The Kansas press association weighted in, referring to Kobach’s handling of the situation as “dead wrong”.
Kobach’s office, however, has explained that he intends to stand by his story that this is work product done by a private citizen, and as a result, will never be available to the public to review. Kansas Republicans may be asked how many jobs one man can hold down at the same time, and how well they can turn off the public/private role when they wish to prevent disclosure.