Kansas Spanish Language Voter Guides Had Some Totally Tiny Errors, No Big Deal At All

Whoops! (yes, it's shopped. Kansas is not tropical. Yet.)

In addition to all of Kansas's other teensy little roadblocks to voting -- like the bizarre two-tier registration system where it's possible for some voters to be registered to vote in federal elections but ineligible to vote in state and local races -- yet another little problem has recently been discovered: online Voter guides in Spanish contained outdated information about registration deadlines and the types of identification allowed at the polls. Needless to say, the office of Secretary of State Kris Kobach insists it was all just an innocent mistake that it's already in the process of correcting, and they sure are sorry if anyone was inconvenienced.

The errors were reported at the Daily Kos last week by Chris Reeves, a Democratic consultant in Overland Park, who was alerted to the problem after a Spanish-speaking voter noticed the discrepancies. Tell us more,  Kansas City Star!  

The Spanish version of the guide said, in two places, that voters could register up to 15 days before an election. The actual deadline, 21 days before the election, was correct in the English guide.

The English guide noted that prospective voters could use a passport as evidence of citizenship to register to vote. Passports, likely to be held by Hispanic naturalized citizens, were left off the list of acceptable ID in the Spanish-language guide.

Kansas changed its voting laws to require the longer cut-off period for registration in 2014, because Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is a vote-suppressing asshole who's made a career out of stirring up fears of voter fraud. Kansas is currently facing a lawsuit over the terrible voting laws Kobach pushed through the legislature. Kobach spokesman Craig McCullah said the differences between the voter guides were the result of a clerical error as the guides were updated for the 2016 elections. Happily, says McCullah, the errors have already been fixed in the online version of the voter guides, and will be fixed soon in print versions, well before the November elections. Nothing to see here, folks, please move along. Definitely no ratfucking, heavens no. Please ignore the copulating rodents and the uncomfortable similarity to 2012, when the wrong election date got printed on Arizona's Spanish-language voter cards. Stuff happens, OK?

[wonkbar]a href="https: //wonkette.substack.com/p/is-cruzmentum-breaking-out-your-super-sexxy-saturday-election-open-thread"[/wonkbar]Except, didn't Kansas already do its presidential caucus thing this year, back in March, right after Ted Cruz Eated A Booger, which gave him the protein he needed to win in Kansas? (Bernie Sanders won the Democratic caucuses, minus the booger-eating.) All McCullah could say Monday was that

he was unsure whether printed copies of the guide had been distributed by the secretary of state’s office or downloaded and copied by residents for use in their registration drives.

So we simply don't know. Still, if the inaccurate guides were in place for the caucuses, wouldn't that mean some voters in those caucuses might have been misled about registration and ID? Hahaha, not like it matters that much, since caucuses are already undemocratic and insane, and it's unlikely that any such disenfranchisement would have been widespread enough to affect the outcome ... but isn't the idea supposed to be that the right to vote is a sacred part of democracy, and states shouldn't be casually pissing on that right, and if they do, somebody needs to be held responsible?

Oh, sorry, got a little carried away there. Problem's being fixed, everything's fine, it was an innocent mistake that only affected people who should goddamned well learn English anyway. Besides, it's not like somebody was denied the right to buy a gun.

[ DailyKos via TPM / Kansas City Star ]