Kansas has a law that requires voters to prove they’re citizens—and so eligible to vote—before they’re allowed actually to vote. A Federal trial judge issued an injunction barring enforcement of the law, and the 10th Circuit Appeals Court upheld the injunction.
After Kansas had shown that in a single county,
eleven noncitizens successfully registered to vote; and after it went into effect another fourteen were prevented from registering. These 25 cases are just the tip of the iceberg in Sedgwick County[,]
Judge Jerome Holmes, for the 10th Circuit, wrote
[W]e reject as based on conjecture Secretary Kobach’s invitation to consider as “just the tip of the iceberg” the twenty-five cases in Sedgwick County of aliens registering or attempting to register. The assertion that the “number of aliens on the voter rolls is likely to be in the hundreds, if not thousands” is pure speculation….
On the other side of the equation is the near certainty that without the preliminary injunction over 18,000 US citizens in Kansas will be disenfranchised for purposes of the 2016 federal elections….
Never mind that Holmes’ near certainty is pure speculation. (I won’t go into the fact that folks wishing to vote in an election being run by a State also must be citizens of that State in order to be eligible to vote, not merely mythically generalized “US citizens”—a fact the 10th Circuit should be embarrassed that Holmes appears not to know.)