Fox News Pushes For Voter Suppression With A Guest Who Has Ties to White Supremacy

CNN's Kate Bolduan Later Showed How To Properly Interview A Guest Peddling False Voter Fraud Claims

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

Fox & Friends hosted serial misinformer Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to claim that voter fraud is “a proven reality” and that he has “tons of proof that it happens,” such as “as many as 18,000 cases of aliens” being on "[Kansas] voter rolls." Kobach has a history of extremism and ties to white supremacists and of promoting misinformation on immigration and voting issues. The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, in a Feburary 12 fact check debunking false-voter fraud claims from White House aide Stephen Miller, explicitly called out Kobach, noting that he “has been mocked for failing to prove his own claims of voter fraud.” Despite attempts by right-wing media to promote massive voter fraud as an epidemic, study after study has found it is nearly non-existent. From the February 13 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends: 

BRIAN KILMEADE (HOST): Chris, you saw a lot of the dust up over the weekend with between the administration and various talk show hosts. They don't believe there's anything to it, there's no proof that this happens. 

KRIS KOBACH: There's tons of proof that it happens. In Kansas, we're fighting the ACLU in a number of lawsuits. So we have actually been presenting cases like this to a federal court. And you mention the one case in Texas. We've got 115 cases of known non-citizens who either got on our voter rolls in Kansas or who attempted to get on our voter rolls. And that's just the tip of the iceberg because you can't discover most of these cases. We had a statistical analysis done of our entire voter rolls, and it looks like we have as many as 18,000 cases of aliens on our voter rolls or people who attempted to get on the voter rolls and are not citizens. And we're just a small state, Brian, so -- population-wise, so if you take those numbers and extrapolate to a state like Texas or California, you're probably talking about hundreds of thousands of non-citizens on the voter rolls and you're absolutely right. The media on the left wants to just ignore it and say, “Oh, there's no proof.” No, we're presenting proof in federal court, but they don't want to put any attention on it. 

KILMEADE: How did we end up on opposite sides of these issues? Republicans and Democrats should be on the same page on this issue. 

KOBACH: You would think so. I don't know why the Democrats don't want to acknowledge this problem. Perhaps it's because they think they benefit from the problem. I don't know. Maybe -- who knows. But the point is it's a proven reality. 

KILMEADE: Right.

KOBACH: And the one way we can solve it is by having proof of citizenship. So when the person registers to vote at the time of the registration, they provide proof of citizenship. We do that in Kansas. There are three other states that do it. Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia. But we should be doing this in all 50 states, and there's no good reason not to.

UPDATE: Hours after appearing on Fox & Friends, Kobach appeared on CNN's At This Hour, where host Kate Bolduan grilled Kobach on his claim that potentially up to “6,000 people [illegally] voted in both New Hampshire and in one of the other states on Election Day.” After hyping that on Election Day, “6,000 people registered in New Hampshire using an out of state driver's license,” Bolduan told Kobach, “voter registration does not equal fraudulent votes,” and noted that a former Republican state official slammed the claim. Bolduan also spotlighted the discrepancies between Kobach's remarks -- including that a definitive judgment on potential New Hampshire voting irregularities would come “at the end of the month” -- and the Trump administration’s baseless claim that voter fraud definitively happened. From the February 13 edition of CNN's At This Hour with Kate Bolduan: