Kansas checks its voter registrations, and finds something curious
The mayor of a small town is not a citizen:
The mayor of a small south-central Kansas town has been charged with committing fraud by voting in elections since 2022 even though he is not a United States citizen, the state’s attorney general and secretary of state said Wednesday.
Attorney General Kris Kobach said Joe Ceballos, who garnered nearly 83% of the vote Tuesday for a second term as Coldwater mayor, was charged with three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury. Both are felony offenses. …
During a news conference in Topeka, Kobach and Secretary of State Scott Schwab said the state is actively pursuing cases like this by using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which can be queried by states to determine a voter’s U.S. citizenship status.
According to The Center Square, 26 states are using the database to verify voter registration information. Schwab confirmed Kansas has begun using the SAVE database to check voter registrations, but also said the case against Ceballos was not compiled using the database. …
Kobach said he expects there will be hundreds of people on the voter rolls who are not legally eligible to vote. Although that may be a small number compared to the 2 million registered to vote in Kansas, it matters, he said.
Indeed it does. And I assume that Kansas has a lot of company in this and is hardly the worst offender. It’s taken an awfully long time to do effective checking, even in a red state like Kansas.
So, now charged with two felonies, this small-town mayor is a candidate for deportation.
Some time ago I came by a summary of a study on alien voting. IIRC, the authors estimated that about 5% of the ballots cast in one recent federal election were cast by aliens and that the Democratic candidate had a 4:1 advantage among them. If that’s true generally, that would mean that alien voting is adding about 3% points to the totals of Democratic candidates on average.
Kansas is a reddish state with a bad habit of electing Democrat governors. In the 50 years I’ve lived here the governor has been a D about half the time, including the current governor Laura Kelly. Fortunately Republicans have done somewhat better electing Attorneys General.
It’s taking a long time because the Uniparty has a vested interest in the status quo. Not just financial, though that’s a huge part of it, but social, too. A lot of people have their social status deeply invested in the current set up, including many formal Republicans. A lot of the older Dems and GOP desperately want to go back to the late 1990s, at heart.
Economics also plays a huge role. The median voter in the USA is soft-right on social issues and centrist/soft left on economics. The median voter distrusts Wall Street at the best of times, and currently despises the finance industry and the elite business class and much of the Main Street business class.
(And for good reason.)
But the senior Uniparty is very much a creature of just that despised faction, the alliance of business interests and social liberals that has dominated American politics since Bill Clinton. Thus, they are vulnerable to MAGA on the GOP side and AOC and Mandami and their ilk and the Dem side.
MAGA and the Mandami/Bernie Dems don’t agree on very much, but their assessment of the economic elite in America is often very similar. They have very different proposed solutions, but they despise many of the same people.
I contend mail voting is the opening of Illegals voting. Can’t make me believe every one is responsibly checked.
Roughly 10% of the population has an abiding impediment to voting in person. Roughly 3% lives in the deep country. Those are the people who should be permitted to establish a standing order for a postal ballot. Each such ballot should be subject to a signature check on its return by a panel of two commissioners at county HQ, then if approved locked away in a pigeonholed metal filing cabinet with two locks, one operated by the Republican elections commissioner’s key, one by the Democratic commissioner’s. Those rejected are locked away in a different cabinet. Ballots returned on or after election day are locked away in a box with two locks. After vote counts are certified, these ballots are mailed back to their recipients with a note of regret. Ballots rejected by the commissioners are also locked away and returned to sender with a note of regret bar a few turned over to the sheriff’s department for further inquiry. The ballots approved are taken to a gymnasium on election day and counted that afternoon, so the postal count is provisionally complete before the polls close. This is now an eschatological concept.
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Do not permit online registration of voters. Have every voter fill out a hard copy form in pen and ink and sign it, sending it in snail mail, postage guaranteed. You can distribute the forms to all post offices, motor vehicle registries, county clerks, municipal clerks, coffee shops, libraries, &c.
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One way to screen out the ineligible would be to have checks of incoming registration applications by a team of two clerks, one from the Republican side of the staff and one from the Democratic side. You have a half dozen databases compiled by different state agencies indicating (1) those currently incarcerated, on probation, on parole, or bearing an impediment from having been so; (2) those for whom a death certificate has been issued in the state; (3) those under a civil commitment order or guardianship; (4) those who have filed a state income tax return in the last couple of years. The first three are categorical impediments to registering to vote. Your absence in the fourth may be an impediment contingent on your answer to questions as to when you established a domicile in the state and when you established a residence. The voter registration form can ask you to aver your citizenship and state your place of birth under penalty of perjury and the same questions can be put on state income tax returns. NB, you need not have a positive state income tax liability, you merely have to have filed the return. You pass through the hoops of the database checks, you’re registered. If not, a postcard is sent to your listed address informing you your registration has been refused for [checks box] reason, please call if you wish to contest this. The state tax authorities, state board of elections, and county boards could undertake periodic audits of sample of returns against other databases to gauge the probity of citizenship claims and identify liars.
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Yes, an eschatological set of ideas in the current environment.
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You’ll note that the simplest thing to have done thirty years ago to remove impediments to voting would have been to change the day for holding elections to Saturday. For only 12% of the adult population is that a regular workday. Congress could have by statute required the 1st Saturday in November be when federal and territorial elections are held and that could have got the ball rolling for changes in state law. Another thing which could have been done was to expand the number of polling stations. New York used to have one for every 1,000 residents. The average of all states is around 1 for 3,000 residents. Cheapo Georgia has one for every 6,000 residents. The one reasonable application of new technology would be to have an online bidding system to staff precincts.
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bof is correct about Kansas bad habits and Donk governors. When I was transferred out there in 1988, kicking and screaming, it was not my intention to stay, so I didn’t pay any attention to state or local politics because I figured I’d be gone before too long. So, I had no idea who Joan Finney was when I encountered the woman during her run for governor.
I was eating lunch with a co-worker when we noticed this grandmotherly looking woman working the room, passing out brochures and whatnot so I asked my buddy, who’s that, somebody’s grandmother running for alderman or councilman or whatever it is you people have out here? And he said, no, that’s not who that is. And I asked well who is it then, and he said you just sit right there and you’ll find out.
Now he knew exactly who she was but wouldn’t tell me; that’s just the way he was about anything he knew that someone else didn’t. I’d become wise to his ways by then and it pissed me off, to be frank about it, and I thought, I’ll break your ass from playing this game right here. What was coming wasn’t quite clear to me, but I knew something was gonna happen.
Anyway, Grandma finally gets to our table and says Hello, I’m Joan Finney and I’m running for governor in the primary and who are you gentlemen and where do you work? My buddy says, Hi, I’m so-and so and I’m a salesman at here in town and named the company. She nodded like she recognized the place and said real seriously oh yes, and repeated the company name, and I’m thinking aw Jeezy, Grandma, could you be just a little less phony about it?
And she turns to me and says how about you, sir? And in my best South Texas accent I said no ma’am, I’m not in bidniz heah. Oh, she said, what is it you do and swear to God, it popped out before I could even think about it, I said I’m the local representative of the John Birch Society. My buddy’s eyes bugged out and he pert neart to swallered his dentures.
And so did Candidate Finney. Her lower jaw bounced off the floor, and she literally sucked in a double lung-full of air, grabbed her chest and took three giant steps backward. I thought I’d given Grandma a heart attack, so I said, oh no ma’am, come on back, I’m just kidding and I work with this gentleman here and I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. She exhaled loudly and walked back over and I asked her, what political party did she espouse? Oh, she said, I espouse the Democrat political party, almost like a parrot would answer you, Polly want a Democrat, and I told her I’d be REAL sure to keep that in mind, and she thanked us and fled at warp speed.
My buddy was passing bricks and all pissed off and asked how come I did that and I told him, next dang time you’ll answer me when I ask you a question, won’t you? And it did break him from playing that little game.
So I said to my buddy, if a bullshit artist from South Texas can nail her that quick, what does she think’s gonna happen to her if she gets to Topeka and my buddy says well, she’s already been the insurance commissioner for about twenty years and I said a few things that really shouldn’t be repeated in public in the interest of public sanitation and clean air and so forth.
And lo and behold, Candidate Finney won the primary and did become governor, and I kept thinking KBI was probably gonna come look me up for a little chat or at least follow me around for a while, but they never did. At least as far as I know……..
Unfortunately, Governor Finney and my buddy are both dead now, so all you have for proof that this actually occurred is the word of a bullshit artist from South Texas.
That’s it; show’s over. You can go now.
In OK, if I ask for an absentee ballot, it has multiple envelopes, one of which needs to be notarized so my picture ID and signature is checked. It is almost easier to just go vote in person.
The state has about 1 precinct for 2,000 voters and the voting sites are very easy to get to in OK County since many are at churches with plenty of parking, space, and so on,
Whenever I see these stories of small town political corruption I always think of the city of Bell near LA. That 2010 incident was where the mayor & city council voted themselves salaries worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year with medical benefit packages for life and used vote by mail to maintain their positions. The FBI claimed it was the vote by mail fraud that allowed it to happen. Lessons to be learned.
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