Huntington right about 'white nativists'

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who led the short-lived national embarrassment that was President Donald Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity, suffered his own dual major embarrassment last week:

A federal judge threw out a 2013 Kansas law championed by Kobach that requires voters to prove citizenship before casting a ballot.

Judge Julie Robinson also ordered Kobach to complete six hours of remedial legal education because he so badly botched the rules of civil procedure in presenting his case.

Kobach may appeal, but Robinson’s ruling should lay to rest Kobach’s bogus claims that undocumented immigrants are casting millions of votes around the country.

Kobach had managed to convince Trump that votes by undocumented immigrants accounted for most of Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2.8 million popular-vote margin in the 2016 presidential election. The six-day trial in March revealed a bare handful of instances in Kansas, most resulting from mere administrative errors.

Kobach had insisted that those instances were just the “tip of the iceberg.” But Robinson, appointed by President George W. Bush, wrote that the trial had given Kobach ample opportunity to “provide credible evidence of that iceberg.”

However, she continued, “the more obvious conclusion is that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

Study after study has debunked the notion of widespread voter fraud. The best estimate is that voter fraud of all kinds occurs about once in every 760,000 votes. Votes by noncitizens are a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction.

Nonetheless, Republican election officials like Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft continue to insist it’s a problem. Ashcroft told a U.S. Senate Rules Committee hearing on Wednesday that voter fraud, while rare, is “an exponentially greater threat than hacking” to the U.S. election system.

The Russians should be relieved to hear that.

Republicans have used this phony voter fraud threat to enact many voter suppression laws, including photo ID requirements and voter roll purges. An increasingly partisan U.S. Supreme Court has endorsed these efforts. Demographic trends increasingly favor Democrats, so Republicans have countered with misleading ad campaigns funded by massive campaign contributions and by making it harder for Democratic Party constituencies to vote.

Kobach, who is challenging Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer in the GOP’s August gubernatorial primary, is the worst offender. He is a disciple of the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, whose 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” warned that “the large and continuing influx of Hispanics threatens the pre-eminence of white Anglo-Protestant culture.”

Huntington predicted that “white nativist” opposition would result.

Huntington, who died in 2008, didn’t see his prediction come true in the form of a president and other elected officials who, fearful of democracy, were willing to lie, cheat and pander to the basest instincts in the body politic.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch