One of the primary moles in our democracy does his business amid the amber waves of grain wafting over the fruited plains of Kansas. His name is Kris Kobach, and he is the Secretary of State out there in Brownbackistan. So far, in his career, Kobach has been the guy that John Ashcroft tasked with weeding out foreign travelers in the wake of 9/11—and Kobach's program was so deeply involved in racial profiling that it was shut down. He also was the author of Arizona's notorious "Papers, Please" law.

Is it at all necessary to point out that Donald Trump thinks Kris Kobach is the bee's knees? I didn't think so.

Now, in Rolling Stone, Greg Palast explains the most recent way that Kobach has been gnawing at the fundamental infrastructure of democracy. It's called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, and it is yet another way to suppress the franchise of the people that Kris Kobach would rather not have voting. Allegedly, this latest scam is supposed to stop people from voting in more than one state, which is another non-problem that Kobach thinks needs a really draconian solution.

As you can imagine, Crosscheck doesn't address the non-existent problem, but it does precisely what it's supposed to be doing.

We were able to obtain more lists—Georgia and Washington state, the total number of voters adding up to more than 1 million matches—and Crosscheck's results seemed at best deeply flawed. We found that one-fourth of the names on the list actually lacked a middle-name match. The system can also mistakenly identify fathers and sons as the same voter, ignoring designations of Jr. and Sr. A whole lot of people named "James Brown" are suspected of voting or registering twice, 357 of them in Georgia alone. But according to Crosscheck, James Willie Brown is supposed to be the same voter as James Arthur Brown. James Clifford Brown is allegedly the same voter as James Lynn Brown.

If this sounds familiar, it should.

We had Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, look at the data from Georgia and Virginia, and he was shocked by Crosscheck's "childish methodology." He added, "God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You're probably suspected of voting in 27 states." Swedlund's statistical analysis found that African-American, Latino and Asian names predominate, a simple result of the Crosscheck matching process, which spews out little more than a bunch of common names. No surprise: The U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names. If your name is Washington, there's an 89 percent chance you're African-American. If your last name is Hernandez, there's a 94 percent chance you're Hispanic. If your name is Kim, there's a 95 percent chance you're Asian.

Unfortunately for the country, Kobach has sold this Big Data Jim Crow to states with like-minded secretaries of state. One of these is Ohio, where SOS Jon Husted signed the state right up in the customary cloud of sanctimonious twaddle.

This is the latest example of how we are using technology to ensure more accurate voter rolls, making it easier to vote and harder to cheat," Secretary Husted said. "When the voter records are up-to-date opportunities for voter fraud decrease, polling place wait times are cut, fewer provisional ballots are cast and more ballots are counted."

The ACLU has been after this for a while out in the participating states. The local offices have instructions as to what to do if you've been wrongly purged. These instructions should not be necessary in a functioning democracy, but we have had our Day of Jubilee and now we have to live with it.

And, of course, there's this whole thing. And this…is CNN.

The breaches are causing concern among election officials because of the voter personal information that could have been stolen, not because of any fear that an election could be stolen, law enforcement officials say. States have a variety of systems—some better than others—but the voting machines and tabulating systems are generally not connected to the Internet, which would be the vulnerability hackers would use to compromise the electoral system. The Department of Homeland Security is unaware of any specific credible threat to the electoral systems, according to a law enforcement official.

This has been an ongoing war throughout the entire history of the Republic. In his history of the right to vote, of how this kind of thing erupted at the beginning of the last century:

Respectable middle-class and upper-class citizens found it easy to believe that fraud was rampant among the Irish or other new immigrant workers precisely because they viewed those men as untrustworthy, ignorant, incapable of appropriate democratic behavior, and not a little threatening.

A piece of paper and the stub of a golf-course pencil never looked more like a weapon to me.

Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io