Surviving Kobach, Ignoring Trump
By John Marshall
Donald Trump may prefer to lie about the veracity of voting by mail, but the postal ballot has been a trustworthy mainstay in American elections for a long time. And the system remains strong in Kansas, in spite of Kris Kobach.
Elections in this state are under the oversight of the secretary of state, an often underrated but vital government office. For six decades, it was a modest, efficient agency, crucial for government and for business. Its purview ran from the smallest cemetery district and the poorest township to the teeming corridors of urban courthouses and buzzing hives of swank offices.
The Secretary’s office kept all the gears in motion. It watched corporations doing business in Kansas and ran the Uniform Commercial Code for secured transactions. It managed all the messy minutiae of business and government, the drudge work of bond filing, of trademarks, commissions, labor union records, drainage and soil conservation districts. It compiled state acts and laws, registered lobbyists and maintained land survey records – for starters.
But managing elections has been its most visible function. For decades, voting in Kansas happened with efficiency and integrity. Then, in 2011, Kobach took office and quickly bullied the legislature into granting him power to prosecute. Kobach rode into election offices and polling places like an old southern sheriff with a new rope.
We have survived that poisonous era: Kobach’s separate-ballot, Jim Crow laws, his suppression of voters, the bogus purging of tens of thousands from the rolls, and his pratfalls in court, his bigoted campaigns to control voting.
The current secretary of state, Scott Schwab, is hardly a progressive but he has at least attempted to put the office back on course, one measured against the office’s old legacy of prudence and enlightenment.
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It had been a magnificent place for a long time, since the early 1950s, when Secretary of State Paul Shanahan (1951-’66) clarified a mission: efficiency and collaboration among government entities in Kansas. When Shanahan died, his widow, Elwill, continued without missing a beat. Voters elected and reelected her until she retired in 1978.
In a way, the Shanahans had become the state’s headmasters – firm, caring, acutely wise to public needs and perceptions. This legacy continued, with remarkable advancements, through three succeeding secretaries: Jack Brier (1978-’87); Bill Graves (1987-’95) and Ron Thornburgh (1995-2010).
For many years, the agency functioned in large and open spaces on the second floor of the Statehouse north wing. The office once was the least-complicated, most-accessible agency in government. Citizens with questions went there, on foot, by phone or through the mail, and got answers.
Mrs. Shanahan’s successors carried on. As the state’s chief election officers, Brier, Graves and Thornburgh were early and passionate advocates of increased voter registration long before the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Known as the “motor voter” law, the act made it easier for Americans to register when they obtain or renew a driver’s license. They campaigned for such reforms as advance voting, mailed ballots, the scanning of paper ballots, and expanding the calendar for voting, among others.
When Graves was elected to his first term as governor in 1994, his deputy, Thornburgh, was elected secretary of state. The agency, with four divisions – Administration, Corporate Registration, Elections and Legislation, and Uniform Commercial Code – continued to run well, at a small cost: five one-hundredths of one percent of the state budget.
Thornburgh, elected to four 4-year terms, left office in early 2010. A space-hungry legislature had forced – after years of Thornburgh’s resistance – the agency to leave its historic quarters in the Capitol for offices across the street. Chris Biggs served an interim ten months through Kobach’s election and swearing-in, in 2011.
The Shanahan legacy suffered in the acrid mists of Kobach’s poisonous rule. He was not the promising headmaster. His name was mentioned mostly with dismissive whispers among the neglected and discouraged.
Kobach evoked the demagoguery of Huey Long and the venom in George Wallace. He helped Alabama and Arizona resurrect Jim Crow for their immigration and voting laws. He honed his product for Kansas, preaching the specter of aliens swarming into polling places to mark illegal ballots. He has been rejected time and again in the judiciary, fined for lying to a court, fined again for contempt in federal court, and admonished by a federal judge who returned him to law school for a refresher course on rules of evidence. (Now he wants to be a U.S. Senator.)
Having survived Kobach, Kansans may dismiss Trump’s frantic bleating against open and inclusive elections. The fraud lies not in our system, but in those who would suppress it. Kansas should emerge with freshened resolve and get on with the voting – absentee, by mail, in advance and on foot.
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