Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an adviser for Donald Trump known for pushing anti-immigrant policies and voting restrictions, on Wednesday said that Trump was right to claim that “millions” of people “voted illegally” in the 2016 election.
“I think the president-elect is absolutely correct when he says the number of illegal votes cast exceeds the popular vote margin between him and Hillary Clinton at this point,” Kobach said after announcing that Kansas had certified its election results, according to the Wichita Eagle.
Elections officials have said that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims. The myth that millions of non-citizens voted in the election, preventing Trump from winning the popular vote, has been pushed by Alex Jones’ Infowars.
Trump’s transition team stood by Trump’s remarks and cited a 2012 Pew study that found that about one in eight voter registrations are no longer valid. But the author of the study said this week that he did not find evidence of voter fraud stemming from the invalid registrations.
Trump’s transition team and Kobach cited a study from two Old Dominion University professors that suggested non-citizens were registered to vote. But that study has been disputed by scholars.
Kobach did acknowledge that he does not have evidence of non-citizens voting.
“This is the problem with aliens voting and registering. There’s no way you can look at the voter rolls and say this one’s an alien, this one’s a citizen,” he said on Wednesday, according to the Wichita Eagle. “Once a person gets on a voter roll, you don’t have any way of easily identifying them as aliens so you have to rely on post-election studies.”
