“SPRECHEN Sie Deutsch?” asks Kris Kobach. Sitting at his office desk surrounded by family photos of his wife and five daughters, the Kansas secretary of state explains (in German) that he picked up the language when conducting research on the influence of referendums on Switzerland’s political system for a thesis at Britain’s Oxford University in the late 1980s. Mr Kobach became interested in electoral law during his Swiss research, an interest which subsequently developed into a fixation with voter fraud. He is also, after successfully lobbying Kansas’s governor to change the rules, the only secretary of state in the land with the power to prosecute people for it.

Mr Kobach’s other favourite topic is illegal immigration, which he became interested in at Yale Law School. An avid debater, he joined a panel on California’s Proposition 187, a ballot initiative passed in 1994 denying government services to illegal immigrants. Mr Kobach fervently defended Prop 187, caring little that it was an unpopular stance at the elite Ivy League school. “He came across as a cultural warrior,” says Jed Shugerman at Fordham Law School, who was among the standing-room only audience of around 300. Mr Kobach’s rhetoric, says Mr Shugerman, was much more nativist and anti-immigrant than was the norm among most conservatives at the time.

Today Mr Kobach has a national platform for his two fixations, which come together in an effort to detect voter fraud by non-citizens (or aliens, as he refers to them). He is vice-chair of the advisory commission on election integrity, chaired by Mike Pence, the vice-president, and established by President Donald Trump through an executive order in May. It met officially for the first time on July 19th.

During the election campaign, Mr Trump became a fervent proponent of the idea that America suffers from widespread voter fraud. He claimed that if he lost it would be because the election was tainted by millions of fraudulent votes, many of them cast by illegal immigrants (Mr Kobach advises the president on immigration policy too). After he won, Mr Trump did not let the idea go, declaring that he would have won the popular vote had 3m-5m votes not been cast illegally. The commission, set up to investigate what seems to be a non-problem, has a budget of $500,000.

The usual suspects

Research reports collected for years by the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law show that voter fraud in general and by non-citizens in particular is extraordinarily rare. In his own state, Mr Kobach has prosecuted just nine cases of voter fraud of which only one was a foreigner, a Peruvian who was in the process of becoming an American citizen when he voted. (Mr Kobach says that he knows of another 128 cases in Kansas but he cannot go after them because of the statute of limitations.) “Why would an undocumented immigrant risk deportation and a fine by voting, especially as immigration officials regularly check electoral rolls?” asks Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, author of one of the Brennan Centre reports.

To counter the consensus among political scientists that voter fraud is very rare, Mr Kobach and other believers in widespread fraud cite a paper by Jesse Richman and others at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, which shows up to 15% of non-citizens surveyed voted at the presidential election in 2008. The controversial study, published in 2014, relied on just 339 respondents. The authors of that report warned that, “it is impossible to tell for certain whether the non-citizens who responded to the survey were representative of the broader population of non-citizens.” Mr Kobach hired Mr Richman to look at Kansas, where he used a grand total of 37 respondents to come up with the figure of more than 18,000 non-citizen voters.

Mr Trump’s commission on election integrity got off to a rocky start. On June 28th it sent out letters to all 50 states demanding data on their voters that are publicly available under the laws of the respective state, including names, dates of birth, political party, last four digits of their Social Security number, voter history from 2006, felony convictions and more. An outcry ensued, in Republican and Democratic states alike. “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” fumed Delbert Hosemann, the Republican secretary of state in Mississippi. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic governor of Virginia, said he had no intention of honouring the commission’s request. Fourteen states, including California and Kentucky, flat-out refused to respond to the letter, says Mr Kobach. Another 16 said they are reviewing the letter, whereas 20 said they would comply by sending publicly available data.

The commission was also hit by three lawsuits, filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Public Citizen. They claim the purported mission of the commission is a sham, and that its true goal is to introduce stringent qualifications on voting that would mainly disenfranchise minority voters. The Electronic Privacy Information Centre filed a suit on July 3rd, claiming the commission’s request violates the E-Government Act of 2002, which obliges the government to assess the consequences of its actions publicly before seeking personal information stored electronically.

On July 13th the White House released 112 pages with over 30,000 public comments on the Trump-Pence commission, nearly all of them negative or sarcastic. “Hi, I voted in all 50 states. Just wanted you to know. Love, Beau in Oklahoma,” reads one. “I am ashamed that my taxpayer dollars are being used for such purposes,” says another. A Californian applauds his state’s decision to refuse to comply with the commission’s request: “your lack of integrity and refusal to acknowledge basic facts undermines our democracy.”

The commission has temporarily halted its request for information. Mr Kobach says he now intends to try to persuade the states that refused to comply with his request. He says that he only asked for information that is publicly available, so states can leave blank whatever data is private in their jurisdiction. He admits that he should have made clear that the information will be destroyed once the commission finishes its work. He also insists that the much-maligned commission is in fact bipartisan. It is led by two Republicans and consists of seven Republicans (four of them prominent proponents of the voter-fraud story, such as Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer) and five hitherto obscure Democrats.

Despite the setbacks, voting-rights activists remain deeply concerned about the commission. “It is still a dangerous vehicle for voter suppression,” says Vanita Gupta, a former head of the Department of Justice’s civil-rights division. In Colorado more than 3,000 voters worried about the data requests have already withdrawn their registration. Thousands more could drop off the electoral rolls. Mr Kobach hopes to nationalise his Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Programme, which brings 27 Republican states together in Kansas to compare voter rolls, says Ms Gupta. Such a matching programme appears to be a reasonable exercise, but a recent study by Stanford University found that Mr Kobach’s programme had 200 false positives for every double voting-registration. Most of the false alarms were minorities because, according to census data, those with names such as Hernandez, Garcia or Kim are over-represented in the most common last names.

The fate of the commission will be important for Mr Kobach’s political future, too. He is running for governor of Kansas next year, hoping to replace Sam Brownback, the staggeringly unpopular Republican governor who recently made headlines when his experiments with deep tax cuts were ended by lawmakers from his own party. “I am not Brownback’s political heir,” says Mr Kobach. He agrees with his tax cuts but he would have combined them with more cuts in spending. He is also more pro-gun than the governor, he says, and more hardline on immigration, promising to end sanctuary policies in Kansas. According to Kansas Speaks, a recent opinion survey by the Fort Hays State University, Mr Kobach has the highest name recognition of nine of the state’s prominent politicians—but he also received the lowest rating.