Kansas and 26 other states backed Virginia in a U.S. Supreme Court win this week after the Biden Administration sought to curtail Old Dominion from purging its voter rolls of self-identified illegal immigrants.
The high court’s 6-3 decision stayed an Eastern Division Virginia Court decision that halted the process of deleting those illegal voters’s names within 90 days of an election.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach led a 27-state coalition in an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to take the case.
“This is a big win for election integrity and the rule of law,” Kobach said. “Kansas was able to provide crucial additional arguments to assist Virginia and persuade the Supreme Court to issue a stay.”
Virginia provides mechanisms to protect election integrity, while ensuring only U.S. citizens remain on voter rolls. The state began the action to purge the rolls within the timeframe allotted by the National Voter Registration Act, but the Biden Justice Department and an immigrant rights group filed the lawsuit anyway. The debate around the move and the legal argument it entailed places more emphasis on the security of the vote in the upcoming election, and the neck-and-neck polling of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris as well as other races on the Virginia ballot.
“The upcoming election is hotly contested and has caused division around the country,” Kobach’s brief in the case red. “Perhaps the division would be lower if the federal government were not interfering with the election via last-minute attacks on state efforts to police voter qualifications.”
Koibach has been a national leader in the movement to secure American elections. As Kansas Secretary of State, he authored and helped pass one of the strongest state election integrity laws in the country. The Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act includes mandatory voter ID, and driver’s license number or license copy and signature verification for mail-in ballots. He also fought for a Kansas law to require proof of citizenship for voter registration, a proposal the U.S. Congress is considering with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act.
Kobach also served as co-chair of President Trump’s advisory committee on election integrity.
“It has always been against the law for non-citizens to vote. Every vote cast by a non-citizen effectively cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen. It is unconscionable that Democrats and activist judges are fighting to keep them on the rolls,” Kobach said.
Dane Hicks is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School at Quantico, VA. He is the author of novels "The Skinning Tree" and "A Whisper For Help." As publisher of the Anderson County Review in Garnett, KS., he is a recipient of the Kansas Press Association's Boyd Community Service Award as well as more than 60 awards for excellence in news, editorial and photography.
