Kris Kobach tells us why he’s running for Sec of State

When Kris Kobach ran for Congress in 2004 against incumbent Dennis Moore, a woman walked into his campaign headquarters. The voter, Kobach says, was a registered Democrat in Wyandotte County but told the Republican candidate that she intended to vote for him. The funny thing was, she’d already received an absentee ballot in the mail — without requesting it.

That didn’t sit well with Kobach, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “I was worried people were fraudulently pulling Democrats’ names off the list to drag those participation numbers up,” Kobach says.

Fast forward to the next election cycle. Kobach lost the 2004 race to Moore by a fraud-proof margin, but his concerns about election shenanigans continued when ACORN, an activist organization, was charged with registering fake voters in Missouri.

“The rise of ACORN nationally accelerates the problem, aggravates the problem even more,” Kobach says of voter fraud. “Kansas is a state that does not have as many protections in place as we need to have in place. And people are very rapidly waking up to the issue in Kansas.”

So yesterday Kobach made it official: He’s running for secretary of state in 2010.

Kicking off a six-city swing through the Sunflower State, the former chairman of the Kansas Republican Party unveiled a platform that takes aim at two problems — two problems the current secretary of state says are just short of imaginary.