If memory serves it was a just a few months back that the media and the Democratic Party shed many a tear over the fate of the voters allegedly “disenfranchised” by a law Kris Kobach championed requiring proof of citizenship to vote.
“The federal trial over a law that disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters in Kansas is expected to end tomorrow,” said a knowing ACLU gleefully back in March.
The New York Times weighed in on the trial as well, claiming Kris Kobach’s law “disenfranchised people who were attempting to register legally but did not have access to the required documents.”
The Kansas City Star editorial board spanked Kobach mercilessly, claiming that since the law went into effect in 2013, “It’s disenfranchised some 35,000 legitimate voters.”
Today, however, the Democratic Party is doing all in its power to deny the 7,000 Kansas citizens who signed a petition to put independent candidate Greg Orman on the ballot for governor, and no one other than the Orman people are using the word “disenfranchise” to describe Democratic mischief.
If the Democrats believed that the petition gathering process was inherently flawed, they would have questioned the 8,000 signatures gathered by another independent candidate for governor, Topeka pastor Rick Kloos. But they did not. Kloos is not a problem.
Orman is. Democrats object to Orman’s signatures for the same reason they object to Kobach’s crackdown on non-citizen voting: it hurts their electoral chances. Their unseemly intervention here exposes their concern for the “disenfranchised” as the pious vote harvesting scheme it is.
On Thursday, the State Objections Board–“all Republicans,” said the Wichita Eagle helpfully–made the Democratic charade harder to sustain when they rejected the challenge by Democratic attorney Will Lawrence to remove Orman from the ballot.
Lawrence objected initially on the basis that several counties missed a legal deadline to validate them. When that claim did not play out, he challenged the way the petition gatherers secured signatures. In the end, he was able to disqualify only 300 signatures because the fellow who gathered them is a felon.
Ironically, of course, Democrats in other states have been championing the right for felons to vote. They will do so for the obvious reason that felons overwhelmingly favor Democrats.
Lawrence did say whether the Democrats would sue to pursue their challenge, but the Orman people expect them to.
