If Donald Trump has a Midwestern avatar, it is almost certainly Kris Kobach. A former George W. Bush official infamous for, among other things, toting a “shocking” fake machine gun in a city parade, Kobach made his name as an early opponent of illegal immigration, an issue he believes is closely tied to voter fraud. While G.O.P. veterans wrung their hands at the thought of Kobach becoming their gubernatorial candidate, Trump positively doted on Kobach, appointing him vice chairman of a commission to investigate the “millions of people who voted illegally” in 2016, thereby unjustly robbing him of the popular vote. The commission, of course, turned up jack squat, with several states ignoring Kobach’s (possibly illegal) demand for their voter I.D. rolls and the Social Security numbers of their residents. But even after the commission found zero evidence of widespread voter fraud, Kobach continued to parrot Trump’s beliefs, telling reporters, in the blindly belligerent style of the president, “For some people, no matter how many cases of voter fraud you show them, there will never be enough for them to admit that there’s a problem.”

In the most ironic of twists, it’s now Kobach who’s attempting to take advantage of a loophole in America’s electoral system. On Tuesday night, the insurgent candidate, riding off the strength of a last-second Trump endorsement, clawed his way to a virtual tie in his primary challenge against sitting Republican governor Jeff Colyer. As of Wednesday, Kobach was ahead by almost 200 votes out of the roughly 311,000 ballots cast, a slim enough margin to call for a recount, a process overseen by—wait for it—the secretary of state’s office. In short order, however, Kobach issued a statement declaring that he would not recuse himself from the recount process, claiming that the recount was done on the county level and that his office had nothing to do with it. “The secretary of state’s office merely serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all but not actually counting the votes,” he told the Kansas City Star.

Kobach’s decision was met with an outcry from election experts and political scientists, who unanimously pointed out the obvious: his refusal to recuse himself was all but guaranteed to undermine the public’s trust in the results. Even worse, no one can legally challenge the results, and while his challenger could request a recount, he would have to front the hypothetical cost—and Kobach could set the price. “He is the state’s chief election officer and there’s an inherent conflict of interest in that, but that’s the way the statute is written,” Rep. John Carmichael, a Wichita Democrat and an election lawyer, told the Star.

Though Kobach’s actions will cause plenty of damage to Kansas’s electoral apparatus, the closeness of the race will likely send Republicans into further fits of anxiety: they had repeatedly urged Trump to support Colyer, worried that Kobach was too divisive, too extremist, and too personally close to Trump to appeal to a wide swath of Kansas voters, and that they would be forced to pour even more money into defending the seat. Trump did it anyway, dropping one of his famed endorsement tweets in the final hours of the race, and nudging Kobach over the finish line—for now. For Democrats, then, Kobach’s refusal to go quietly is something of a gift. “We’ve emerged from last night unified,” Ethan Corson, the Kansas Democratic Party’s executive director, told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “They are well on their way to what could be another week of a brutal and toxic gubernatorial primary.”