There are some who would say evoking silence from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is akin to a miracle.

After all, despite the many criticisms of Kobach, he often isn’t shy to talk. He even has been known to provide information when he didn’t intend to. See a now infamous photo of him with a set of documents and then president-elect Trump.

And when the subject is illegal voting, Kobach normally becomes like a “Game of Thrones” fan at a cocktail party. You need an actual wizard to get out of that conversation.

But evidently that is not always the case. It has been a little more than four months since I first reported a potential voter fraud case involving Douglas County Sheriff Ken McGovern and his elderly mother. I’ve asked Kobach’s representatives approximately a half-dozen times for an update on the case. Most times, I haven’t even received a response from his office. I did on June 14. Spokeswoman Samantha Poetter sent me an email saying she expected to have an update for me later that day. That was the last I’ve heard from her, despite checking in several more times.

Why is Kobach silent on the matter? I, of course, don’t know. I can only speculate. Fortunately, one of the perks of being an editor is you are allowed to do that.

I suspect it is because the case puts Kobach — who is running for the GOP nomination for governor and is President Trump’s co-chair on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — in a tough position. As a reminder, here’s the key allegation made against octogenarian Lois McGovern: She voted in the 2016 Douglas County primary while being registered at a Lawrence home that she had sold more than a year earlier. The evidence suggests she actually was living in a Johnson County nursing home at the time of the election. Her son, Sheriff McGovern, picked up the ballot for her, knowing that she was registered to vote at a home where she no longer lived.

A citizen filed a complaint with Kobach’s office against the McGoverns in September, and then another in October. For months, the complainant didn’t hear anything from the secretary of state’s office about the status of the complaints. The Journal-World became aware of the allegations and asked Kobach’s office about them in February. At that point, Brian Caskey, director of elections for the secretary of state’s office, said enough questions surrounded the allegations that the matter had been forwarded to the secretary of state’s prosecutorial division. I continue to await what they found. Here are my theories about why Kobach won’t tell me:

• Kobach doesn’t want to tell me he is prosecuting Lois McGovern. Prosecuting the elderly mother of a fellow elected Republican is not necessarily a popular thing to do. Forget the party issue even. Voters don’t like it when they think you are picking on the elderly. I caught a significant amount of heat for reporting the story to begin with, which is fine. I’ve figured out that journalism isn’t the best road to popularity. But I thought prosecutors, like Kobach, had figured out their path is a bumpy one too.

• Kobach doesn’t want to tell me he is not prosecuting Lois McGovern. Once he says that, the follow-up questions become tricky. That’s because a couple of points in the case are pretty clear: Lois McGovern didn’t live at the Lawrence home where she was registered, and she had no legal right to live at the home — in other words, she didn’t own the home, she had no lease on it, and she didn’t have an invitation to live there.

If Kobach says she didn’t break the law, then the immediate question becomes whether anyone can use an old residence as an address to vote, regardless of whether the person even lives in the community anymore. I lived in Emporia for a short time, but it has been at least 25 years since I did. Could I simply use my old address and start voting in Emporia again?

It seems absurd, and it would be a particularly odd position for Kobach, who is regarded as the hottest of firebrands on the issue of illegal voting. Already, it seems the issue is potentially embarrassing for Kobach. Think about it: The person who has been charged with shoring up the security of our national voting system oversees a state system that lets people vote in communities that they aren’t a resident of. I know there are people who don’t want the votes of illegal immigrants canceling out their votes. Wouldn’t those same people be concerned about someone who doesn’t even live in their town canceling out their votes in local elections?

• Kobach doesn’t want to tell me that it was an honest mistake on Lois McGovern’s part. It is very possible she was just ignorant of the law. (Although, you would have thought it would have raised a red flag with her son, the chief law enforcement officer of the county.) But Kobach has made it clear he doesn’t think ignorance of the law is a defense. His website says: “Each step of the process must conform to the law, from voter registration to casting votes to counting ballots and certifying results.” If Kobach says this is just an innocent mistake, that will imply that it is just one vote that didn’t alter the outcome of any election. But the moment Kobach adopts that philosophy is the moment his political house begins to crack.

• Kobach hopes the issue goes away. At one point, Poetter told me the case had been resolved. She said there had been a decision not to prosecute, but it quickly became clear we were talking about a different case. Lois McGovern also voted in the 2016 Douglas County General Election. At that time she had changed her voting address to her son’s Lawrence home, although she wasn’t living there. But you could reasonably argue she had an intent to return there, and that perhaps would make her legal under Kansas laws. But I told Poetter that I was more interested in the primary election case where Lois McGovern was registered at a home she no longer owned and had no legal right to occupy. It was clear that was new information to Poetter, and that’s when the trail went cold.

The easiest strategy for Kobach would be to simply tell me his office is still reviewing the matter and that he has no comment at this time. I probably wouldn’t even criticize him for that. I simply would report his statement and make sure I kept checking in for an update — all the way through a gubernatorial campaign, if necessary.

But Kobach didn’t say that or anything else. And that is disappointing from a public servant who wants to serve you in even a higher office.