Kansas Secretary of State Backs the White House: New Hampshire Senate Race that Swung on 1,017-Vote Margin May Have Been Decided by 6,000 Out-of-State Voters

The squabble over New Hampshire erupted this week during a closed-door White House meeting in which Trump told Ayotte he thought her close defeat – and his own loss there – was the product of voter fraud.

Miller was sent out on Sunday to defend him. 

Ayotte was in Washington as a former senator to help the Trump administration smooth Judge Neil Gorsuch’s landing on Capitol Hill in advance of his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. 

Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, organized the Interstate Crosscheck Program, a cooperative 30-state initiative that compares voter registrations in an attempt to void inactive and obsolete entries as people move from place to place.

He was also on a short-list to become Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration. 

‘I just got off the phone with the New Hampshire secretary of state, Bill Gardener,’ Kobach told CNN anchor Kate Bolduan on Monday.

‘New Hampshire is a same-day registration state. And on election day, Nov. 8, 2016, 6,000 people registered in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver’s license as their form of identification,’ he said. 

‘Of those 6,000 – over 6,000 – just under 3,000, so just under half, used a Massachusetts driver’s license.’

Kobach acknowledged that ‘some of those are going to be legit,’ including people who moved to New Hampshire on or before Election Day. But he insisted that some in that group voted illegally in more than one state.

‘We do know that a lot of people did that, and we will have data at the end of the month,’ he promised.

New Hampshire election law permits people with out-of-state ID to participate in elections if they attest that they maintain a ‘domicile’ in the state – meaning ‘an intent to maintain a single continuous presence.’

Poll workers, however, do not ask for proof. 

Bolduan insisted that Kobach’s pending analysis doesn’t yet support Miller’s claim that ‘thousands’ actually committed voter fraud by being bussed across a state line.

‘Voter registration programs does not equal fraudulent votes,’ she said, calling Republican alarms ‘irresponsible.’ 

‘It’s like the Yeti. you can keep talking about it, but you’re not going to find it,’ Bolduan declared.

Kobach responded that some voter fraud likely took the form of mail-in votes from Massachusetts residents who had traveled north nine months earlier for campaign work during the New Hampshire Primary season.

And he disclosed that as the chief law enforcement officer in Kansas, he has prosecuted criminal voter-fraud cases. 

‘I just got that prosecutorial authority a year and a half ago. We’ve already filed nine cases, and we have six guilty pleas,’ Kobach said, noting that Kansas is a small state. ‘And the nine cases are just the ones at the top of the list.’ 

President Donald Trump has made repeated claims about widespread voter fraud, suggesting it numbered in the millions and cost him a symbolic popular-vote victory in November.

The White House has provided no evidence to the Federal Election Commission to support that claim. Trump has promised to sign an executive order aimed at determining the size of the problem.