Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial aspirant Kurt Kobach appears – appears – to be off to a bad start in his moral test on the recount of his primary race in which he also has some influence, according to The Wichita Eagle:
[Governor Colyer spokesman Kendall] Marr added that “on top of the recusal, we’re also asking that the secretary of state stop giving incorrect information to the counties, particularly related to the mail-in ballots.”
[Current Governor and candidate for Governor] Colyer released a letter at 5 p.m. calling on Kobach to recuse himself from providing advice to local election officials. The letter comes after multiple counties reported that the election night totals on the secretary of state’s website were inaccurate, further clouding the results of a historically close election.
“It has come to my attention that your office is giving advice to county election officials — as recently as a conference call yesterday — and you are making public statements on national television which are inconsistent with Kansas law and may serve to suppress the vote in the ongoing primary election process,” Colyer said in a letter.
Marr explained in a phone call that the campaign has heard that Kobach’s office told county clerks to disregard ballots with a smudged postmark. Marr said that ballots received before a Friday deadline need to be counted.
Perhaps just a misunderstanding. More to the point:
Around the same time news broke that Colyer received 100 more votes in a western Kansas county than previously reported, the governor’s campaign announced the establishment of a voter integrity hotline. Hours later, additional counties reported that votes had been incorrectly reported on Tuesday.
“We’ve received countless reports that voters experienced issues when they voted on Tuesday. Many Colyer voters had difficulties finding his name on the ballot, were forced to vote on provisional ballots, or were turned away outright for unknown reasons,” Marr said in a news release.
Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas, said the hotline was a clear indication that Colyer’s campaign is preparing for a potential court case.
Looks like a classic case of low-level dirty tricks. Any one by its own could be excused as mistakes, but taken together, they appear to indicate someone who’ll do a lot of illicit things to win.
But we’ll see. Appearances from here could be deceiving. Maybe a court will be able to clarify matters.
