Fish v. Kobach
2018 Kansas District Court case
Fish v. Kobach (officially known since January 19, 2019 as Fish v. Schwab) was a 2018 bench trial in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas in which five Kansas residents, the ACLU and the League of Women Voters contested the legality of the Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) requirement of the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, which was enacted in 2011 and took effect in 2013.
Kris Kobach, then-Kansas Secretary of State, attempted to claim these procedures were needed to protect the nation from a supposedly massive problem of vote fraud by people not legally allowed to do so, including 11.3 percent of non-citizens residing in the US amounting to some 3.2 million votes in 2016. The plaintiffs in this case claimed there was no evidence to support Kobach's allegations and that tens of thousands of American citizens were unnecessarily removed from voter rolls as a result of the law.
Trial hearings ran from March 6 to 19, 2018, with a contempt hearing for Kobach on March 20 with Chief District Judge Julie A. Robinson presiding. Robinson was appointed to the District court by President George W. Bush in 2001. On May 18 Judge Robinson ruled Kobach in contempt. Final rulings were issued June 18 and 19, 2018. In brief, Judge Robinson found that the defense had presented no credible evidence of the massive problem claimed and instead had erected substantial obstacles to voter registration by people eligible to vote per the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fish v. Kobach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.