Talk:Kris Kobach/Archive 1

Untitled
This article claims that "caging" is illegal, but fails to provide any citation to an existing statute or court order. Ramcharanr (talk) 15:53, 27 December 2007 (UTC)Ramcharanr
 * The relevant court order would seem to be DNC v. RNC, from 1982, discussed here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Vote_caging I haven't located the full order, so I don't know its exact provisions, nor how clearly it applies to what the KS GOP was doing.  A law further regulating the activity was proposed in 2007, but didn't pass: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9194.html Josh Rosenau (talk) 23:05, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Reversions and edits
I have made edits with citations, and included the funding for many of the lawsuits he is involved with that are documented as well as his current status as an attorney Of Counsel with the IRLI. If there is a campaign of those attempting to hide these facts, I would recommend locking the profile to editors and those registers. If people are going to make changes, I would advise they register and cite their changes properly and abide by NPOVIlliniGradResearch (talk) 20:38, 20 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I have further revised the page to include more third party citations for reference while creating a uniform style of reference work within the article. I have reference points regarding his positions where appropriate while conforming to NPOV statements of his work. IlliniGradResearch (talk) 08:59, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Disputed Sources
Jrosenau has recently undid edits which challenged sources which give evidence that Kobach took funds from white-supremacists. In deleting the sources, the fact was not being disputed, but rather, 1. The reliability of sources in some of the circumstances, or 2. The sources did not give evidence (unless political opponent's accusations are evidence). The sources should be replaced with sources that show 1. That the contributions were accepted and that 2. The donating group(s) were white-supremacists. Government group listings or self-identification should be used to determine if the groups were white-supremacists; sources like The Pitch or Southern Poverty Law Center are not reliable sources on this matter.


 * I appreciate your putting this in talk rather than simply deleting the sources again. I think your deletions were in error.  There is not government listing of white supremacist or hate groups.  The government does not and should not make lists of people who believe certain ways. Given those terms' associations, few groups self-identify that way.  This is why watchdogs like SPLC are crucial, and why SPLC is listed as a reliable source in Wikipedia's Reliable Source Noticeboard.  The Pitch Weekly is a well-regarded news outlet and I see no basis for disregarding it off the bat.  If you question the reliability of the story itself, that's different than simply declaring a recognized watchdog and journalists covering the 2004 race to be inherently unreliable.  Leonard Zeskind, the Pitch's reporter, is a well-regarded and widely-published researcher on white nationalism and related movements, so it remains hard to credit the claim that his reporting is unreliable.


 * The citations all bear on a sentence about what brought Mr. Kobach's campaign to national attention. Citing a national watchdog's report on Kobach certainly demonstrates national attention.  The report itself states "In 2004, Kobach ran for Congress.… Kobach lost by 11 percentage points after his opponent accused him of ties to white supremacists."  This justifies the claim that national attention was brought in part on the basis of credible accusations of ties to white supremacists.


 * You claim that the sources must a) show that the contributions where accepted and b) show that the groups were white supremacist. As to a) the Pitch article notes "To date, Kobach has received the maximum amount permissible, $5,000, from FAIR's related political action committee, the U.S. Immigration Reform PAC. (Tanton's wife is its president.)"  As to b) I'd be happy to see this source added to demonstrate the links between Tanton and white supremacist groups: http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/pdf/static/splc_nativistlobby_022009.pdf


 * I would also be happy to see the sentence reworked to take emphasis off of Mary Lou Tanton and focus it on groups like FAIR, whose ties to Kobach are more fully discussed in a later section. I could see some variation on: "The election brought Kobach some national attention, due to Kobach's stance against illegal immigration and contributions from groups reportedly tied to white supremacists."  This rewording has several advantages.  First US Immigration Reform PAC is not the only such group with questionable ties, so the sentence as it stands understates the case, as articles by Zeskind and others show. Second, this rewording would not assert the white supremacist link as true (a point not germane to the sentence), merely as reported and therefore spurring national attention. With your consent, I'll make that change. Josh Rosenau (talk) 08:49, 2 May 2010 (UTC)


 * I will add that you also removed a Washington Post article (which is indisputably credible), which shows that race to have been the most noteworthy in Kansas that year, and that it was "a heated campaign, with each candidate accusing the other of holding extremist views. … painting Kobach as having ties to white supremacists." This is all the disputed sentence is trying to argue: the race drew national attention in part due to discussion and dispute around Kobach's ties to white supremacist groups. Josh Rosenau (talk) 09:24, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

The links on this article needs to be reviewed. ^ "Don MacRobert knows how to get ahead of the game", by Ronnie Apteker and John Vlismas, Business Report, May 25, 2007. Retrieved 2010-04-29. is a dead link and a search for the article at http://www.iol.co.za returns no result. It needs to be removed if the link is dead. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.134.209.176 (talk) 12:28, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Kobach's ties with FAIR are undisputed Why are they not in the article?
"In 2004, Kobach became senior counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the legal arm of FAIR. In concert with IRLI Director Michael Hethmon, Kobach filed suit against Kansas, which had passed a law that year to grant in-state tuition to the children of illegal immigrants who had attended a state high school for at least three years and graduated. The Kansas challenge was thrown out in 2006. A similar case, filed by Kobach in California, ended last November, when the state Supreme Court rejected his claims." from the SPLC which is on the wikipedia good sources list. IRL is a hate group or at least called a hate group by SPLC it should be noted as such. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.106.92.246 (talk) 19:46, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

he holds religious ceremonies using state premises and funds...
and fires people for not attending! this is against the constitution.... anyone fancy writing it up? not a yank so not going to myself....82.9.105.183 (talk) 13:37, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Do you have a reliable source that states this? Dyrnych (talk) 14:17, 21 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Right now, it's alleged in a lawsuit filed recently this happens. IMHO, not really worth adding in right now. LionMans Account (talk) 16:37, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Kris Kobach. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090621082238/http://www.law.umkc.edu:80/faculty/kobach.htm to http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/kobach.htm/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20090607060529/http://www.irli.org:80/attorneys.html to http://www.irli.org/attorneys.html/

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 03:46, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program
Just curious why there is no mention of the Crosscheck program in this article.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/the-gops-stealth-war-against-voters-w435890

MKevH (talk) 00:35, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Claims of "voter fraud" are highly controversial
It is POV to talk about "voter fraud" or "caging" without mentioning the controversy surrounding those terms.

The article currently cites a Lawrence Journal-World article claiming that Kobach sent an email in December 2007 saying, "[T]o date, the Kansas GOP has identified and caged more voters in the last 11 months than the previous two years."

"Caged" is not a common word in a context like this. It's not obvious what it even means without a reference to something like the 1982 consent decree against the RNC for using caging to disenfranchise African-Americans. This consent decree has since been repeatedly renewed, because of fresh evidence of new violations. It therefore seems to be POV to avoid mentioning that context.

To try to fix this problem, I tried to add the following: "It's interesting that Kris Kobach in 2007 would brag about caging (voter suppression), especially since the Republican National Committee has been under a consent decree since 1982 for caging African-American neighborhoods in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

On 2017-03-27T01:21:03 User:Corkythehornetfan reverted that addition, claiming "That's violating Neutral point of view."

Comments? DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:28, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The only problem I have is the wording. "It is interesting...". It may be interesting to those who differ from Kobach's views, but those who support him (or are at least conservative) would say it really isn't interesting. If you can figure out a way to reword it, then I say re-add it. Corkythe hornetfan  (ping me) 02:40, 27 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I removed the discussion of voter fraud in connection with the Kansas SAFE Act, which has the same problems as your other edit: it is WP:SYNTH. Regardless of the actual prevalence of voter fraud, it is not appropriate for a Wikipedia editor to use an unrelated source to imply a conclusion about the wisdom or need for a piece of legislation.  I'm sure there are plenty of sources out there specifically discussing the act, which may or may not be useful in this article (and whose claims may or may not need to be attributed to their authors). Dyrnych (talk) 03:41, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Photo
This article would be much improved with a photo of Kris Kobach. Anyone have one we can use on Wikipedia? Or if someone has contact with Kobach himself, they can get one from him. -Beaven

I found a few photos on Kobach's Facebook page that might work better. One of the ones in this galley, possibly cropped. http://imgur.com/a/8Jf0o I'd add one to the main page, but I just made this account and am not confirmed yet to upload files. GoCorral (talk) 19:28, 12 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Please only upload a new image of Kobach if it is public domain or if its copyright holder has released it under a free license, per WP:IUP. —Granger (talk · contribs) 20:16, 12 May 2017 (UTC)


 * We are NOT allowed to use a photo from someone's Facebook page. Placing a photo on FB does NOT qualify as "public domain".
 * WORSE: Many of the world's ultra-wealthy (people like Turkey’s president Erdoğan) would LOVE to sue the Wikimedia Foundation and completely shut us down.  They might be able to do it over copyright violations, like using a photo without permission -- e.g., from a FB page.
 * I'm not an attorney, but I'm not a complete novice on copyright law. https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms says that any user gives FB "a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you [users] post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it." If you upload something to Wikimedia Commons, you must release that material under something like CC-BY-SA 4.0, in perpetuity.  You can't do that with a photo taken from someone's FB page, because they are not authorizing FB to use that material in perpetuity.
 * If you have a source that says otherwise, I want to know. The Admins on Wikimedia Commons are exceptionally strict -- with good reason. They've been stricter with me than I thought necessary, but I can't carry the risk of a serious lawsuit.  In the 1990s, ABC chose not to air a documentary on tobacco which had cost them $500K to produce, after Philip Morris invested "a paltry $10 million or $20 million in legal fees" to suppress that broadcast.  This is a standard SLAPP lawsuit tactic.  This case is discussed further in section "3.2.2.  Media ownership, funding and profitability" in the Wikiversity article on Winning the War on Terror.  The case never reached an official judicial verdict, because it wasn't worth the legal fees for ABC to pursue it.  Philip Morris made lots of money from that investment.  This is a standard abuse of our legal system -- and I believe people with lots of money want to make sure it's not fixed.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 21:03, 12 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Didn't know Wikipedia's rules on it. I can think of a few reasons why using a Facebook photo would be acceptable legally, but that seems like a broader discussion that's probably already been treaded over many times by more frequent editors. I've sent an email to Kobach's media manager asking for permission to use the photos.
 * If you're interested, here's the legal justification, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAIR_USE_Act Section 3, Article V. Having a representative photo would be in the public interest. Implied consent might also be valid http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Implied+Consent Kobach uploaded those photos with the intent of them being a representation of what he looks like. Why wouldn't he want that representation on Wikipedia as well? (Especially considering the ugly photo we have now). Implied consent seems particularly valid for the first and last photos I linked as they are used in a handful of news articles about Kobach. They're still there years later, thus showing that Kobach has given his implied consent for them to be posted in other locations besides his Facebook. Regardless, the standard is to get permission so we'll do that. GoCorral (talk) 00:46, 14 May 2017 (UTC)


 * It is my understanding that changes in the Copyright law of the United States since 1970 have been primarily written by lobbyist for the major commercial media conglomerates largely under a media blackout. The result is copyright law that invites Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) to protect established industry giants against competition.  For more on this, see Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.
 * For information on the response of the Wikimedia Foundation to the threats this poses to Wikimedia projects, see Handling Images in Commons. Copyright tutorial.
 * See, for example, File:Anwar Shaikh ~2016.jpg: Prof. Shaikh sent me that photo with permission to release it to Wikimedia Commons.  However, his official permission did NOT comply with the standard verbiage required by Wikimedia Commons.  As a result, the photo will be deleted unless I can impose sufficiently on Prof. Shaikh's time to get him to send them an email with the required verbiage.
 * Rather than take his time with that, I expect I will likely see him at a conference later this year and take a photo of him myself at that time. I may also prepare a special form to have him sign for this and another photo with the Wikimedia Commons copyright verbiage.
 * Dealing this this is painful but necessary: David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years says, in sum, that as far back as we can see in the historical and archeological record, people with power have established the rules to benefit them and impoverish and enslave everyone else.  When this becomes unbearable, the peasants revolt, the old regime is overthrown, and the cycle begins again.  The most productive peasant revolts are nonviolent;  see Winning the War on Terror.  Please excuse if this is too much information.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 01:22, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Questionable sourcing
@Dyrnych @DavidMCEddy et alia: Claims (see ) have been made citing Mother Jones and Salon.com, both radical leftist media sources. I must question if these sources are considered reliable. Quis separabit? 23:12, 21 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Salon is not "radical leftist", but your POV is showing. Morty C-137 (talk) 01:54, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * OK, Salon is not "radical leftist", just leftist. And Mother Jones, I hear crickets. Surely Mother Jones isn't "radical leftist". Quis separabit?  02:33, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * If I thought you had something meaningful to say, I'd respond sooner, but it's clear to me you're not interested in discussing sources, just slandering them. Morty C-137 (talk) 02:50, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * If National Review, New York Post, Washington Times are all relentlessly objected to on the grounds of bias, then holding Mother Jones to another standard is unacceptable. Quis separabit?  02:53, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Quis separabit? I'm confused: Why are you mentioning the National Review, New York Post, and Washington Times? DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:06, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I am confused by it too; am I allowed to say that it looks a lot like Quis has an axe to grind? For the record I wouldn't say that his three proposed sources are bad solely due to bias, I'd say the primary problem with them is that they have zero standards of journalistic integrity and a habit of publishing falsehoods and either refusing to retract, or publishing a "retraction" buried on page 152 behind the kitty litter ads. Morty C-137 (talk) 14:41, 22 May 2017 (UTC)


 * The Wikipedia articles on The New York Post and The Washington Times document publications of falsehoods that are not retracted. The Wikipedia article on The National Review does not say that.  It was founded by William F. Buckley, who built a great reputation for integrity, I thought, in pushing a Conservative agenda.  Unless it has changed since Buckley stopped editing it, I don't think it belongs in the same category as The New York Post and The Washington Times.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:02, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * It has changed significantly - partly because of the launch of the online edition, partly because it has turned from being a reputable source to a clearing-house of less than stellar think-tank pieces. Morty C-137 (talk) 20:06, 22 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Can you find clear examples that could be documented -- or publication(s) (preferably in refereed academic journal(s)) -- that say that? If yes, they need to be added to that article.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:27, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * It was declining even back in 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/media/17review.html Morty C-137 (talk) 20:30, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * RealOrSatire says "The National Review has been called out on its cozy relationship with the Discovery Institute and, as with any source, you should aim to verify NRO’s articles from other sources whenever possible — especially anything science-y." http://realorsatire.com/nationalreview-com/ Morty C-137 (talk) 21:04, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I also found this, regarding National Review's issues. http://www.salon.com/2012/12/19/national_review_writer_shooting_was_result_of_a_feminized_setting/ Morty C-137 (talk) 21:12, 22 May 2017 (UTC)


 * The reliability of the source depends on the context. In this instance the three articles attributed to sources you (in some cases, maybe myself) find objectionable are only used to place the subject of the article at certain places, and are not used to craft a direct narrative. Salon and Mother Jones are without doubt reliable in this context.--SamHolt6 (talk) 04:20, 22 May 2017 (UTC)


 * Agreed: What are they cited for?  I sometimes cite material that I think is wrong -- but rarely without explaining why I think it's wrong and citing other sources that say things I think are more reliable.  In this case, what I see was written from a neutral point of view, etc.  Thanks.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 10:50, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Given that I didn't use "Mother Jones" for anything, it sounds a lot like Rms125a@hotmail.com is trying to insert them merely to make an attack. Morty C-137 (talk) 14:35, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

We shouldn't call him a racist in the lede. There isn't good sourcing for that. I'm pretty sure there are RS out there that would substantiate the claim that critics have accused Kobach of trying to reduce minority turnout. Something like that would be acceptable provided that it could be RSed and if enough text is added on the criticism to the main body of the article. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 17:36, 22 May 2017 (UTC)
 * I need to point out: "we" are not calling him racist, but it is notable that his critics are quite strong about the question of his motivation. Morty C-137 (talk) 17:37, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Enervating edits
A few days ago, I edited the Kobach article to correct a term that was clearly wrong. RMS125a reverted it minutes later. I then went locate to numerous reliable sources that established the accuracy of my edit. In doing so, I tried to track RMS125a's edits and was lost in a labyrinth of odd changes, i.e., inserting "language=en" into citations where they were likely to have never been useful to any subsequent reader. I then started to explain why I had corrected the incorrect title of Kobach's campaign treasurer, an individual who had won a number of seats in recent elections, and to change it, only to find that RMS125a had reverted his or her own reversion. In frustration, before that discovery, I had written the following. This sort of enterprise is costly to me in the sense I don't have time to spend arguing over edits that are clearly correct. I wrote the following, but just before I posted it here I discovered the reversion. I changed the description of Tom Arpke, Kobach's to campaign treasurer, from "treasury secretary" this morning. RMS125a, without any cause whatsoever, reverted it. There is no such office by any stretch in Kansas as "treasury secretary," though such are elected in various jurisdictions, and the Secretary of the Treasury, a cabinet post, is often referred to as the capitalized "Treasury Secretary." Campaigns do have appointed treasurers, however. They are tasked with accounting for contributions, expenditures and keeping the accounts and making the requisite disclosures. Arpke been elected to the Salina, Kansas City Council, and the state house, before becoming Kobach's treasurer, so he was intimately familiar with the contribution, accounting and disclosure regulations. If RMS125a had bothered to check, he or she would have discovered that quite quickly. Googling "Tom Arpke" and "Kris Kobach" produces these results, for instance: (top 3 hits) "Kris Kobach Campaign Committee Fined $5000 - Watchdog.org watchdog.org › Kansas Oct 27, 2011 - TOPEKA — Secretary of State Kris Kobach's campaign committee was ... Kobach Campaign Treasurer Tom Arpke (in front of door) addresses ..." "Statehouse Live: Kobach campaign given maximum fine of $5,000 for ... www2.ljworld.com/news/.../statehouse-live-kobach-campaign-given-maxium-fine-/ Oct 26, 2011 - Topeka — The campaign of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach on ... campaign treasurer, Tom Arpke, a Republican state House member ..." "Kan. sec of state's campaign reporting scrutinized - News Radio KMAN 1350kman.com › State News Sep 29, 2011 Kobach said Thursday that his campaign treasurer, state Rep. Tom Arpke of Salina, is not responsible for the mistakes and actually helped find them. Commission Executive Director Carol Williams said Kobach’s campaign omitted $35,000 worth of contributions and $42,000 worth of expenditures from reports in 2010." Activist (talk) 12:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)


 * According to the standard history tool I know,, RMS125a made 233,032 total edits between 2005 and the time I checked a few moments ago. User talk:Rms125a@hotmail.com says, "I realize that I have strong deletionist and immediatist instincts, which I will work to control. I have OCD which is why I often edit for MOS consistency".
 * What do you suggest be done to reduce the frustration level of User:Activist with his/her attempts to improve this article?
 * Thank you both for your contributions to Wikipedia. Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive said that the opera director tolerates the temper tantrums of the lead soprano, because she packs the house.  Drucker said we should staff for strength and manage to make weakness irrelevant.  [Not an exact quotes, but close.] I hope you two can find ways to collaborate constructively for the betterment of humanity -- which, I believe, is why both of you spend as much time as you do editing Wikipedia.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:59, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the advice, DavidMcEddy. There is a problem with an editor's text, but it's not "synthesis" at all: It's copyvio  I've reworded the text Rms125a complained about, so as to avoid such a problem as follows: "It is the opinion of election-law experts, that Kobach is deliberately creating impediments for voters who represent Democratic constituencies."Activist (talk) 13:05, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I believe that you are good to go with your edit. It is well sourced, pertinent to the topic, and said sources are used in the proper context. Another citation to supplement the Washington Post source may be welcome. If there are any objections to the content we can always hash it out on this talk page at a later date.--SamHolt6 (talk) 13:18, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I believe that you are good to go with your edit. It is well sourced, pertinent to the topic, and said sources are used in the proper context. Another citation to supplement the Washington Post source may be welcome. If there are any objections to the content we can always hash it out on this talk page at a later date.--SamHolt6 (talk) 13:18, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Killian or Kilian?
The source on KCUR spelled the name of the person convicted of vote fraud as "Killian". If that's incorrect, you need to find another source. DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:41, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I found another source, since I found the two different spellings. It's odd, actually. Not the conventional Irish surname, "Killian," but "Randy" Kilian.  He's a geologist in Hays, KS. Activist (talk) 16:16, 22 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Which one is correct? Is it worth trying to correct it?  The simplest thing to do might be to include another . ??? I would not take the time to research it further;  they key point here is not that Kobach has conflated a handful of seniors voting in two different jurisdictions into a major threat to democracy, when the available evidence suggest there are much bigger problems elsewhere, e.g., with gerrymandering.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:30, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Kilian seems correct. A quick google search of "randy kilian kobach" reveals lots of article on the subject, all which say Kilian as his last name.  LionMans Account (talk) 16:45, 22 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Great. Who has time to fix this -- including citing multiple sources while explaining the confusion?  I reverted the correction, because it conflicted with the source cited.  It might be good to include a that cites 2 or 3 different sources that clearly discuss the same case with different spellings and explaining why "Kilian" is correct and "Killian" is not. ??? DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:57, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Here's the URL for the guy's company: http://medea.kgs.ku.edu/filer_1/public/2010-11/solar.documents_attachments.binary/sid=1005474958.pdf Activist (talk) 17:02, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the input. The reporter who wrote "Killian," obviously made a mistake, and may have been given a document that was in error. I also read Rms125a's direction regarding dropping the "only," characterization. It seems he's right about Wikipedia policy on that. I don't see any media using that exact word, but reporters do note, for instance, with unspoken irony, that Kobach's been in office over six years and has prosecuted a grand total of 8 cases, out of the tens of thousands he claims exist, and the huge amount of time and money he's spent trying to find his poster child. I wonder if he's tried putting it on a milk carton? None were for voter impersonation. (I think only one was an illegal immigrant, and the rest were older Republicans.) So I don't see any writers taking him seriously, but they're not saying that magic word. There are 125 general election House races every two years, and 20 Senate races those years in Kansas, and I've only found one that has been decided by the number that Kobach had eventually expanded to:Three. It was Gene Rardin's House District 16 race in 2006. The next nearest I found was won by 17 votes, Ed Trimmer's District 79 race, a few years back. Activist (talk) 17:33, 22 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I fixed the reference to a citation that repeats the correct spelling of the name numerous times and expanded the section to incorporate more expert info from the source story. Activist (talk) 09:28, 23 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks. That's a great improvement.
 * I rearranged the verbiage and broke that one-paragraph section into five paragraphs. I believe it's more readable;  I hope you and others concur.
 * Does the article still cite a source that uses the "Killian" spelling? If yes, then I think the note that cites that should include some verbiage explaining the spelling error.  This can be done with syntax like the following:
 * I appreciate that you've already done a lot of work on this, and this last refinement may not be worth the effort. (I may also have OCD.) DavidMCEddy (talk)
 * ,I don't think it needs a mention. It's just one reporter or source who had the spelling of the defendant's name wrong. I write to 4-5 reporters a week to pull their coat and let them know they've made a mistake, usually just spelling or typos, and they usually write back to thank me, because it gives them the opportunity to change the on-line version. I got a nice note back from an internationally known reporter on an important story just yesterday. Another rather famous writer made a mistake with her shooter story in Virginia and I checked with two other sources before I wrote her to let her know. I haven't heard back from her but I'm half willing to guess she's already fixed her mistake. Activist (talk) 15:34, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * P.S. If you think you may have it, you most likely don't. It's like having hives. You'd be scratching. 15:35, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * P.S. If you think you may have it, you most likely don't. It's like having hives. You'd be scratching. 15:35, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Citing Capitol-Journal
you changed several references from Topeka Capitol-Journal to something like "The Topeka Capitol-Journal]]".

I see two problems with this: First, Topeka Capitol-Journal links to the Wikipedia article on "The Topeka Capitol-Journal", at least in standard text;  I don't know if it does it in a footnote like this, but I believe it likely does. Have you checked it?

Second, you removed the opening " " but left the closing "", which is an obvious syntax error.

I appreciate your work on this article. I hope you will find time to either restore " " before "The Topeka Capitol-Journal" or remove the closing "]]";  I think the the former would be more useful, assuming the link actually works there. (If it doesn't, I don't know what the square brackets would do for Topeka Capitol-Journal in that context.)

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 11:31, 25 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Many of the stories on the Kobach page were linked to the Capital-Journal. The problem is that the citations were often overlinked, and frequently misspelled as the "Capitol-Journal." The Wikipedia article for that newspaper refers to it as "The Topeka Capital-Journal." I was also attempting to achieve some consistency. I'll clean up the brackets problem. Thanks for pointing that out. Activist (talk) 12:02, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Canfield lawsuit

 * The Canfield lawsuit, filed in 2016 and which has not even gone to trial yet, qualifies as recentist. Until there is a verdict, as a US citizen Kobach is presumed innocent until proved guilty, and mentioning the trial is nothing more than inflammatory weasel-wording. Quis separabit?  15:05, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * ,, , ,  "Recentism?" Spare me. The Canfield suit is four years old. It hasn't gone to trial because it takes forever to do so. It isn't a question of "guilt or innocence," rather it's a question of liability. You're not reading the citations or you would understand this. I have a life. My phone is ringing off the hook. I don't have time to argue with you. I expect you to be professional and respectful and if you think I'm wrong, and most of that text and citations have been in the article for a very long time and is not mine, take it to RfC. Activist (talk) 15:22, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Without having read the content, I just want to note that there is nothing that precludes coverage of court cases, so long as the language mirrors that of reliable sources. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 15:30, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I thought I was going to have to go in and delete everything about Bill Cosby's criminal complaint.  It's clearly "recentism" and he hasn't yet been found guilty. Only 10 jurors were willing to come to that verdict, so it shouldn't be in Wikipedia until the case is finished. Activist (talk) 16:01, 23 June 2017 (UTC)
 * ,, , , , I checked to see the status of the Canfield lawsuit. Kobach was recently deposed and the wrongful termination/religious discrimination trial is set for August, but I could not find the info in WP:RS, so I haven't posted that to the article. Activist (talk) 13:48, 27 June 2017 (UTC)


 * What's RSS? RSS (disambiguation) lists 29 different possibilities.  If one of those fits this situation, I missed it ;-)  DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:58, 27 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Sorry about causing confusion. I'd meant to write RS, as in WP:RS (or WP:V). My fault. Activist (talk) 15:45, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Birtherism
The notion that Barack Obama was born outside of the United States is a blatant falsehood and should be described as such, regardless of whether specific sources on the topic explicitly say that it's false in every instance. I'm pretty sure that it's Wiki policy to describe blatant falsehoods and conspiracy theories as such, even if a particular RS does not do so explicitly (e.g. if someone says vaccines cause autism in an interview, but the interviewer doesn't debunk it, we can still say "person X falsely asserted that vaccines cause autism").

That said, the sources cited here do basically say that it's a falsehood: "Hawaii officials have repeatedly confirmed Obama's birth in their state. Last year, a federal judge in Washington threw out a lawsuit on the issue, saying it was a waste of the court's time." Snooganssnoogans (talk) 17:02, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

It's not OR to describe the views of election-law experts as reported by the RS cited
This text basically mirrors the RS cited: "It is the opinion of election-law experts, that Kobach is deliberately creating impediments for voters who represent Democratic constituencies." Snooganssnoogans (talk) 17:04, 30 June 2017 (UTC)


 * Please excuse: To what are you referring here?
 * Secondarily, it takes me a while to decrypt "OR" and "RS": With effort, I found WP:OR and WP:RS.  I assume that's what you are referring to.
 * I agree that your quote does not violate Wikipedia policy to avoid original research if the quote comes from a reliable source.
 * However, I don't find the line you quote in the article, so I'm confused.
 * Thanks for your many contributions to Wikipedia. DavidMCEddy (talk) 19:12, 30 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The line was removed in some of the edits earlier today. Can't write more at the moment. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 19:25, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

The neutrality of this article is disputed
In a revision on 2017-06-29T02:33:59 User:Rms125a@hotmail.com added. This added a box at the top saying, The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until conditions to do so are met. (Learn how and when to remove this template message)"

Could you please explain why you added this, and what you think needs to happen to justify its removal?

Is there any dispute, for example, about whether Kobach said the League of Women Voters was communist?

On 2017-07-02, "72.196.125.111" deleted the information that Kobach ""fought to remove nearly 20,000 properly registered voters from the state's voter rolls", claiming, "That language is in no way neutral. This edit keeps the neutral fact of his stricter voting laws with less charged language." I reverted that deletion then replaced it with the following quote from the New York Times article cited: 'In September 2016 he "agreed last month to add nearly 20,000 properly registered voters to the state’s rolls only after being threatened with contempt of court."'

I agree that some of the claims in the article sound extreme. However, if the facts are not in dispute, we should not normalize them by refusing to adequately describe them, especially if they relate to an issue of serious public policy.

Given the general level of documentation and discourse in this article, I would single out the "Travel issues" section for dramatic reductions. There may be others; I have not reviewed this article in detail. However, the "Travel issues" section currently sounds to me like partisan bickering: Was the travel was justified by the honest needs of the state with campaign events arranged to match the schedule imposed by his official duties? Or was the travel arranged to support his campaigning with unnecessary official work scheduled as a fig leaf to force the taxpayer to fund that? And did he take his family along to get a free vacation at taxpayers' expense, or was that justified to give a hard working public official some reasonable contact with his family? There is one citation from the AP plus a report on KMUW, an NPR station in Wichita.

This reminds me of the White House travel office controversy ("Travelgate"), which "began in May 1993." It was "the first major ethics controversy of the Clinton administration. ... Travel Office Director Billy Dale was charged with embezzlement but found not guilty in 1995. In 1998, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr exonerated Bill Clinton of any involvement in the matter. ... In 2000, Independent Counsel Robert Ray [reported that] some of [Hilary] Clinton's statements were factually false, there was insufficient evidence that these statements were either knowingly false or that she understood that her statements led to the firings."

Since you've made many of these most recent changes, it seems wise to seek your input on this. Since you've also been involved with this article recently, I thought it wise to seek your thoughts on this question. DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:05, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * {{Ping|Rms125a@hotmail.com},,, , , Thanks very much for asking these quite legitimate questions and involving those who have most participated in the editing of this important article. In background, with regard to the travel, the AP did an Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) request to get the travel of all officials and personnel on the state Highway Patrol plane for less than a 15-month period, of the more than five years of Kobach's tenure. They knew the state's financial condition was dire. Their discovery appears to have been an accident. I expect they were astonished when they saw that Kobach stood out alone for "gallivanting around" as one source put it, as if the state plane was his own free local UBER service. Flying over two thousand miles to Virginia for the funeral of a friend, and carrying along an evangelist, had zero state benefit, as the sources indicate. Traveling around much of the country to do in and out-of-state voter suppression, and attend "ice cream socials," and "Republican picnics," are not state business, and should not be a burden on taxpayers. Kobach and his wife home school their five daughters who live a short commute from his office. The AP article was widely circulated throughout the state. I expect there are many more than 100 newspapers in the state, mostly local, low circulation, and they can ill afford to do massive records act requests and conduct the interviews and be able to professionally analyze and interpret the complex production in response to their KORAs. It's absolutely normal for them to rely on a press service such as the AP. Tying up the state plane meant that Kobach was tying up the pilots and co-pilots, adding to overtime costs, and potentially diverting them and the plane from other critical police tasks such as tracking and capturing fleeing suspects, responding to earthquakes, floods, massive fires and tornadoes (all of which have plagued the state for many years), raising maintenance costs considerably, adding fuel and landing fee costs, etc. The problem seems to be an overweening sense of entitlement. The purpose of Kobach's $6,000+ travel to Washington was to rescue a friend over ethics questions, a man whom he had appointed and reappointed, a married guy who promoted his own incompetent girlfriend to be his second in command and would spend many hours locked in an office with her, with subordinate staff afraid to interrupt by knocking on the door, a man who spent lavishly on toys, etc., for himself and tried to cover those expenditures by using his girl friend's county credit card, and then approving what were actually his own expenditures, and who was appointed the the D.C. job as Executive Director of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), at the behest of, and result of the admitted personal intervention by Kobach, with possibly the intent of, but with what certainly became the actuality of, using that office to suppress, rather than facilitate voting nationwide, and did so in that position in Kansas, Alabama and Georgia, an intervention that was roundly rejected by the courts. http://cjonline.com/news-legislature-local-state/2016-10-17/ap-exclusive-us-elections-chief-brian-newby-left-behind There is ample reliable sourcing for all this, easily found in the public record. So, travel is in fact, in this case, clearly a notable issue. Other local issues, such as getting a permit for building a residence and calling it "agricultural," to keep from paying appropriate fees and taxes, and probably pulling rank to keep from paying the usual penalties for doing so, are much less so. In addition, Kobach, when he called the League of Women voters "communist," told those in attendance in the same breath, that he actually hoped to be quoted. Activist (talk) 10:34, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I should say that I've been vaguely familiar with Kobach since around when he ran in a 2004 primary for Congress against Adam Taff, a moderate and previous congressional nominee who got into a lot more campaign finance trouble than Kobach who narrowly won the primary. Kobach didn't have a Wikipedia article at the time. He really appeared on the national radar after he wrote Arizona's SB1070, the "Breathing while Brown" law, for then-State Senate President, Russell Pearce. Pearce lost a primary a couple of years later after he advocated the forcible sterilization of women on Medicaid. Kobach had beaten an incumbent Democrat for the KS SOS position the previous November with Maricopa County's then-Sheriff, a fellow "birther," Joe Arpaio, who went to Kansas to campaign for him. Kobach was collecting $300 an hour for training Joe's deputies, but Arpaio wound up attracting thousands of lawsuits at the cost of tens of millions, anyway and was finally sacked by voters last year. I first edited Kobach's article over 3 years ago, and have made 62 edits to it since, so I've been somewhat familiar with his politics for eight years or so. Activist (talk) 11:58, 2 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Sometimes the more I say the less I communicate. If, as you say, Kobach's travel is "clearly a notable issue", the section as currently written fails to make that point, at least for me, in a way that is clear, concise and compelling.
 * Unless I'm an outlier in this regard, I think you could be more effective if you could make your main points with 10 percent of the words.
 * However, I'm still not convinced that these "Travel issues" merit space in this article. If you supported Kobach's policies, I'd be surprised if you were upset by the fact that he's spending a few thousand dollars of taxpayer money pushing them.  Even the "$6,594 for airfares and other expenses" doesn't seem excessive to me for someone with his level of responsibilities.
 * Did his protege Newby violate any law or even a standard administrative practice by changing the voter registration form as he did, "Without having provided public notice or notification to the three-person commission"? If yes, then review what's said about that in some other section of this article that discusses the national voter registration program.  Otherwise, you are wasting your credibility harping on it.
 * I recently cut 20 percent from something else I'd written, because that 20 percent raised issues that I was not able to discuss in a way that was sufficiently clear, concise and compelling to keep the typical reader engaged and convinced.
 * You've made many useful additions to this article, I think. I'm less impressed with this "Travel issues" section.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:29, 2 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Although I don't always agree with you, I respect your integrity and analysis of the issues. Kansas has a policy, the intent of which is clearly stated, that the governor, in the event he or she uses the Highway Patrol plane for personal or political reasons, reimbursement of costs is mandated. When that policy was written, I can't imagine the framers ever anticipated that a lesser state official would commandeer the aircraft, at no cost, for whatever whimsical or frivolous purpose impelled them to do so at the time, and so they neglected to extend and apply that oversight and policy to everyone in the upper echelons of government. Kobach took advantage of that lapse of authority. Kobach also obviously employed the "fig leaf" mentioned by his critics, so he retrospectively claimed that flying over three hundred miles, a five hour round trip by car to attend a Republican picnic in Wichita included some legitimate function of his office, because the Sedgwick county elections chief was in attendance. I would also contrast his misuse of the plane with the experience of former Governor Kathleen Sebelius, who traveled to New Orleans with her family, to attend a weekend jazz festival, flying commercial. When a tornado hit Greensburg, Kansas, that Friday night, instead of attending, she determined the extent of the damage (95% of the town was destroyed) and flew back hours later on a plane loaned to her in the emergency by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, in order to deal with the catastrophe.
 * Newby did certainly violate policy in the EAC, though he did do what Kobach wanted him to do. That's what the hearing was about and why Kobach, his sponsor, sped to defend him. Newby shouldn't have been hired in the first place: Given his ethical difficulties, he couldn't even have passed a required rigorous background check to become an actual commissioner. But the Republican controlled U.S. Senate refused to confirm three successive Obama nominees over four years for the vacant fourth seat on the Commission, so the two partisan Republicans controlled all votes, including the hire of the executive director, on what had been structured deliberately to be a bipartisan body, when it was created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) legislation. One of the EAC's prime functions is the regulation and testing of voting machines, and the standards for them haven't been upgraded for 12 years, barring the implementation of any design improvements, and leaving them extremely vulnerable to hacking. Now the Republicans have recently passed a bill to the House floor which would eliminate the EAC entirely, leaving no one with the authority to approve of and mandate any useful protection against voting machine and register list hacking.
 * I'll talk a look at the travel section and see if I can't both trim and better explain the issue. I'll look forward to your comments on it. Activist (talk) 11:30, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

I am deleting the flag you added on 2017-06-29T02:33:59. If you still feel that flag is warranted, please explain why on this talk page.

For example, Kobach claims that the League of Women Voters are communist and the integrity of our electoral process is seriously threatened by votes from people not authorized to do so. If you know any credible sources that support these claims, please provide such citations here.

If there is anything else in this article you find unsubstantiated and inconsistent with credible sources, please discuss it here.

does NOT mean accepting and repeating outrageous and unsubstantiated claims at face value.

Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity
I thought your new paragraph on the "Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity" regarding his fishing expedition for all the voting records in the nation was an important and useful addition. I would support you reinstating it.

My only question was whether Kobach himself actually acknowledged that Kansas law would not allow him to comply with his own request: A claim to that effect should perhaps be omitted unless it could be substantiated with another citation:  It seems to stretch credibility.
 * I added a second source, the Washington Post. Check the cite; Kobach can't comply.

In my view, this is very different from Kobach's travel budget, which we discussed elsewhere. Maybe Kobach did push the envelop in his use of state-funded travel. However, that's far from obvious. By contrast, I think the "Voter Integrity" issue is important and worth discussing. DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:40, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * The NY Times said that Kobach admitted that he couldn't comply with his own request. I also saw it on TV last night, probably on Public Television's News Hour.
 * I didn't know my paragraph had been removed. I'll revert the removal if it's been deleted. It's getting a lot of media coverage. Activist (talk) 16:54, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * ,,,, Now I see what the problem is. Rms125a removed a citation that had been in the article for five months, made by another editor. The "basis" Rms125a gave for the removal was that it was in an opinion piece. It was an opinion piece, written by the Editorial Board of the state's largest newspaper, the Kansas City Star. So there was joint oversight in crafting that piece which formed the basis of the citation. However, the circumstance which the piece verified was not an opinion. It was a fact. If the KC Star says that there were "a half dozen" instances where the subject of the article brought a criminal case, that's a FACT. If they wrote: "half a dozen" that's the same as "SIX." By changing the language, while keeping the meaning, we avoid copyright violations, of course. If they then say, which they did, that what Kobach did was a dumb thing to do, now that's an OPINION. Their opinion doesn't change the fact on which that opinion rests. Now the citation that was removed from the lede was the basis of other edits on the article. So when Rms125a removed the citation, he or she removed the basis for the subsequent citations, so Rms125a felt justified in removing those facts as well. Now Rms125a's need for a sense of order also led that editor to change the date I'd used on a citation from 1 July 2017, to July 1, 2017. Both ways, European vs. U.S. conventions, convey exactly the same information. One is simply one character shorter than the other. But Rms125a felt a need to change that. By doing so it became more difficult to revert those inappropriate edits, because it created an edit conflict. This is not the first time this has happened. I have a lot of work to do, and don't have time to make a quarter of a million edits to Wikipedia, as Rms125a does. But I also feel that legitimate, well sourced and clearly stated edits made by myself and others should not be inappropriately deleted, and I feel some obligation to restore them. I have an often poor internet connection, so that process can be quite tedious. I'd rather be sleeping and in fact was going to bed a half hour ago when I discover the difficulties created by Rms125a's edits and fought with the poor connection problems. I'm going to try to go to sleep now, and hope when I awaken, that Rms125a has not deleted those long standing edits in the article that I'd restored because somehow they needed to be erased once again. Other editors have looked at those edits, commented upon them, and feel comfortable with them. That's a consensual process. That's what's done in Wikipedia. Thank you. Good night or good morning or whatever it is where you live. Activist (talk) 18:13, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Corrected sentence is; I'm going to try to go to sleep now, and hope when I awaken, that Rms125a has not deleted those long standing edits in the article that I'd restored because Rms125a somehow felt they needed to be erased once again. Activist (talk) 18:19, 1 July 2017 (UTC)
 * One last thing. Another editor here noted that Rms125a had acknowledged having OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). That explains a lot, but the explanation doesn't solve the problem. Rms125a wrote;"I realize that I have strong deletionist and immediatist instincts, which I will work to control. I have OCD which is why I often edit for MOS consistency, which can mean anything from dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy formatting to fixing or tagging barereflinks to removing or delinking (depending on the age and relative importance) of redlinks. Nobody said I was perfect. Quis separabit? 15:24, 3 October 2015 (UTC)" So please. Have mercy. "Work to control." Activist (talk) 18:38, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

@Activist: your sleazy reference to my "deletionist" instincts and conflating it with OCD are truly deplorable. My deletionist instincts primarily refer to deleting crufty, crappy stub article created by people who think Wikipedia is a fansite. Removing inappropriate text from articles is not my idea of discretionary deletionism but rather an imperative binding on all good faith editors. "I have a lot of work to do, and don't have time to make a quarter of a million edits to Wikipedia, as Rms125a does." -- That does not appear to be accurate given your recent spate of editing but in any event, your lack of free time is your problem. Don't expect the rest of us to wait for you to catch up. Perhaps if your username (and conduct and rhetoric) did not appear to indicate a partisan bent on your part (to put it mildly) your editing would not be subject to oversight and review. Activists are inherently non-neutral folks, in case you didn't know. Quis separabit? 01:54, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * ,,,,"Sleazy reference?" I cut and pasted what you'd written about yourself. So are you complaining about my quoting precisely how you've described yourself?  Besides characterizing my edit in that way, you also have attacked my intent and even my USER name. You're the third person in over 11 years to do the latter, so you must have an obvious point. I've described myself as a "good government activist." I hadn't realized that it was a pejorative. Neither had Wikipedia, it appears: "'Activists are also public watchdogs and whistle blowers, attempting to understand all the actions of every form of government that acts in the name of the people: all government must be accountable to oversight and transparency. Activism is an engaged citizenry.'" That doesn't seem like such a terrible thing to me. My contributions to the Kobach article in the last 3+ years constitute 1% of all the edits I've made in the last 11 years. He's hardly an obscure figure, as he has regularly thrust himself into public prominence for the past 13 years. A Google search produced 545,000 hits on his name and he's become ubiquitous in recent months. I've made about the same number of edits to the "Fat_Leonard_scandal" article. No one has reverted so much as a comma or a period I've placed in that article, which deals with staggering government malfeasance. It's not a partisan issue, the corrupt situation existing since the GHWB administration, first investigated in 2012, and prosecuted by both the Obama and Trump Departments of Justice. Lastly, you're attacking the reporter on the "Kilian" story as having written a problematic article. She's not some amateur. She's done scrupulous, non-partisan reporting for many years for the public radio station at UMKC, where Kobach was a law professor. From the station's website: "Peggy Lowe is Harvest Public Media's investigations editor. Her work has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Here & Now, and Latino USA. Before her return to the Midwest in 2011, she was a multimedia producer and writer at The Orange County Register... Until 2005, she was in Denver, where she was a reporter for the...Denver Post, KBCO and the AP. Lowe was the Mike Wallace Fellow for Investigative Reporting at the University of Michigan in 2008-2009." I would note that both of those major regional papers have a rather conservative reputation. Activist (talk) 03:29, 4 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Can we please stop the assertions about the personal characteristics of one editor or another and focus on the quality of the text? I believe you both are working to make this a more credible article that is more consistent with Kobach's actual record.
 * I agree with Rms125a that the tone of this article seems on the surface to be biased and under normal circumstances would have to be drastically rewritten?
 * However, I have not checked every detail, but the ones I have checked appear to be adequately supported by fairly solid documentation.
 * For example, Kobach did say that the League of Women Voters (LWV) is a communist organization.
 * Are you claiming that Kobach didn't say that? Or that the LWV is communist?  Or that it's biased to say that in this article?
 * Or that this particular statement is accurate, but there are many others that are not? If so, can we please discuss here which particular assertions are questionable before making contentious edits?  Then let's discuss what the references actually say, the extent to which each such reference is credible, and what should be said here?  Let's please discuss all that here before make further edits that others might find objectionable.
 * Regarding the LWV, I think Kobach actually said that, it was reported by sources we should be able to agree would not likely distort a claim like that, and it's material to this article -- and therefore, it should be quoted roughly as it is in this article. I don't know about other claims in this article.
 * Tragically, we do not live in normal times. In our current post-truth environment, the mainstream commercial broadcasters (and other mainstream outlets to a lesser extent) appear to have decided in the mid 1970s that honesty and balance in news reporting was a threat to their profitability.  The current balkanization of American politics is, in my judgment, a product of that.  For documentation, see Winning the War on Terror -- which is on Wikiversity precisely to invite edits by others.  That includes claims that may seem to many to be superficially extreme -- except that they seem to be supported by the weight of the available evidence.  The conflicts we are having over exactly what this article should say are, I believe, symptoms of the current deplorable media environment in which we live.  We need to find ways to provide honest content here considering these problems.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 05:49, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I've think I've been scrupulous in providing sources for what edits I've made. For instance, this is from the Lawrence Journal World, from last February. "But it may have been Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach who caused the most stir by labeling the American Civil Liberties Union and the League of Women Voters as 'communists' for challenging the proof-of-citizenship voting law he championed in 2011. Speaking to a committee of 2nd Congressional District delegates, Kobach said: 'The ACLU and their fellow communist friends, the League of Women Voters — you can quote me on that, the communist League of Women Voters — the ACLU and the communist League of Women Voters sued,' Kobach said, making sure that reporters in the room heard him." The URL for this has been in the article: http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2016/feb/20/kansas-republicans-hold-hard-right-agenda In the article, he also is quoted patting himself on the back (which cost the state a lot of wasted dough) for defending the bad decision of his protege, the ethically-challenged Brian Newby, to change voting forms in three states without Newby bothering to tell his three commissioners about his intervention. In fact, I'm guessing this move actually originated with Kobach himself, with his friends, the two Republican commissioners who completely control the EAC decisions, in the absence of the fourth commissioner whose nomination McConnell has kept sequentially stalled for five years, but he fails to reveal his role to the faithfully assembled.
 * So the difficulty is, I think, not that we're unfairly noting rash and hyperbolic statements, but that he has a proclivity for making them, quite deliberately, sometimes repeatedly, intentionally succeeding in drawing applause and notoriety, but thereby simultaneously becoming notable for his propensity for launching rhetorical bombshells, his episodic bad judgment, and his disdain for the truth. He's a very smart guy:  He wouldn't be doing this if he didn't think it was somehow in his best interest. There's no reason to exclude that behavior from the Wikipedia article. He's not also alone in this approach to politics, as he spelled it out for this interviewer: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/rogue-state-how-far-right-fanatics-hijacked-kansas-20130612
 * There's no point in killing the messenger.
 * I also would like to see the tone here ratcheted down. I also, as may be obvious, when I have had a few moments to spare, have been working my way down through the article (I think there may be some redundancies in it, that need to go) to get to the Travel section and review it as you recommended with an eye toward reducing it in size and seeking more clarity. I'll take a few more minutes to try to do that. I'm willing to listen and work collectively to resolve the problem before us. Rms125a also has made many helpful contributions to the article, so I hope for the best. Activist (talk) 08:12, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity
You are invited to participate in two relevant RfCs at Talk:Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. --Dr. Fleischman (talk) 20:23, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Continued inappropriate deletions
This is directly from the existing citation:"'Using open records requests to obtain daily logs along with emails and other materials to piece together an accounting of the plane's usage from Jan. 1, 2015, to March 24 of this year, the AP found several flights by Kobach that appeared to either offer no benefit to Kansas residents or have little connection to official duties.'" This is the sentence  that you deleted, and which I have restored: "'Several Kobach flights appeared to neither offer any benefit to Kansans, nor were they in pursuit of official duties.'" As you can see, your deletions are not supported by the policies you quote. I'll change the sentence slightly, but not its meaning, which is an accurate paraphrasing, as required, of the cited text. Activist (talk) 19:17, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

Inappropriate deletion
,,, , The quotes from Assistant Professor Patrick Miller are neither "irrelevant," "syntheses," nor POV. A number of experienced editors have reviewed the cited reliable source, which has been used and was long standing in another section of the article as well, and the text itself, and have not had problems with the quotes and attribution. It can be submitted for an RFC if it seems necessary. Activist (talk) 00:34, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

@Activist -- there is nothing inappropriate about my having deleting the following:"University of Kansas assistant professor of political science Patrick Miller includes voter intimidation as a form of fraud. “The substantially bigger issue with voter fraud has been election fraud being perpetrated by election officials and party officials tampering with votes.” 'It is not the rampant problem that the public believes that is there. Kris Kobach says it is. Donald Trump says it is. And the data just aren't there to prove it. It's a popular misconception that this is a massive problem.”(ref name=Kilian/)"

This is little more than the expression of a personal and partisan opinion in an article whose neutrality is already strained and probably compromised already. Quis separabit? 01:58, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * As properly sourced work by a topic matter expert - yes, deleting it is highly inappropriate. Morty C-137 (talk) 23:11, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Also, I was primarily referring to the following as synthesis (and exegesis, for that matter): "Passage of the law and its implementation had a negative effect on agriculture. Farmers discovered that non-Hispanic citizens were typically unwilling to labor under difficult working conditions, or lacked the aptitude or experience to work fast enough to earn sufficient compensation, often quitting during the first day on the job." I note that this was not restored or mentioned by @Activist who inferred that the entire edit was invalid. Quis separabit? 01:58, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, I hadn't noticed that you had deleted that. Activist (talk) 02:07, 4 July 2017 (UTC)
 * Your comment, that it was, "...little more than the expression of a personal and partisan opinion in an article whose neutrality is already strained and probably compromised already," I presumed to mean you contested the article that the reporter had written, the excerpts I'd added having been almost entirely composed of her intact quotes from the professor. In fact, there is nothing I'd authored in my edit except the briefest intro to the quotes that should be characterized somehow as my "partisan" or even "personal" editing, save for what I'd rewritten to avoid a copyvio. Activist (talk) 04:14, 4 July 2017 (UTC)

"Hardliner views on immigration"
Text saying that Kobach has "hardliner" views on immigration keeps getting removed, leaving us only with text that says "Kobach has come to prominence over his views on immigration". Well, what are the views that he has come to prominence over? Shouldn't we describe those? Did he come to prominence due to his support for open borders? Readers don't know, because we don't specify what his views are or on what spectrum they fall. The reliable sources that are cited after that sentence describe him as an immigration "hardliner" (that's literally in the title of the Reuters piece) and the Politico piece essentially describes him as a highly influential actor in the push to restrict immigration (i.e. an immigration hardliner). We should therefore say that "Kobach has come to prominence over his hardliner views on immigration". If someone has a great substitute for "hardliner", I'd like to hear it. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 09:44, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I got a email that noted that the descriptive noun "hardliner" had once again been removed, this time by Doorzki. Not looking at the history, I undid the reversion without reviewing the citation at the end of the sentence, from the first of many articles that came up when I searched for the terms Kobach+hardliner. I undid that reversion, which has been discussed some time ago, immediately after the use of the word "hardliner." After my edit, in which I used a cite from the McClatchy chain, which had used precisely the same descriptor as wire service Reuters, I looked at the article's history and realized that Doorzki had reverted that reliably sourced term five times, and a quickly-blocked sockpuppet mocking Morty_C-137 had been used to revert it a sixth time, apparently in an effort to avoid a 3R violation. The sockpuppet, I found, had been quickly blocked. Then RMS125a@hotmail.com joined Doorzki in deleting the term once again.Activist (talk)
 * After I had requested that Doorzki apologize to Snooganssnoogans on the latter's talk page for his unwarranted personal attack on that editor, a few days ago, and I was greeted by numerous infantile responses by Doorzki mocking me, I presume I was added to a stalking list. This has really got to stop. Activist (talk) 16:11, 6 August 2017 (UTC)
 * Doorzki has been blocked by User:Future Perfect at Sunrise indefinitely both for WP:NOTHERE and for being a highly likely sockpuppet after they repeatedly tried to vandalize a 3RR report about their behavior. So, hopefully that's done now? Morty C-137 (talk) 16:23, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

"Alarmist" is too vague
Thanks for your many contributions to this and other articles.

I think the term "alarmist" should be removed, because I think it's too vague. If it's used, it should be used with a flag that links to a section discussing this in the article.

I think we can quote specific statements he has made and note that each such statement has been contradicted by credible sources -- and further that no one has yet brought to this article any credible source supporting his claims. Maybe include a footnote something like the following:



What do you think? DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:36, 20 August 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm totally open to finding a new term for "alarmist". My point is simply that we need to make it clear that Kobach wildly exaggerates the extent of voter fraud: do something to describe what kinds of claims he makes about voter fraud (does he exaggerate or does he say that there isn't any voter fraud?). I'm not sure that the footnote is warranted: all the sources that we have cited confirm that his claims are unsubstantiated, and as someone familiar with the political science literature on this subject, there is simply nothing that supports Kobach's claims of endemic voter fraud. If a new working paper or report made voter fraud out to be a bigger problem than the existing research, I'm pretty sure that I'd be the first one to add the new research to this article. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 13:17, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
 * How about just "exaggerated" or "false"? Volunteer Marek (talk) 22:37, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
 * I originally opted for "false" a couple of months ago. The text then morphed into "unsubstantiated" a few months ago, which I thought was a compromise acceptable to RMS, though RMS has now repeatedly reverted that wording in the last few weeks. I can accept "exaggerated". Snooganssnoogans (talk) 22:42, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

Persistent issue-name reverts
An IP editor changed Kobach's middle name to "Kevin," numerous times. Other editors have corrected it. I went to numerous independent reliable sources and they all have his name as "William." It's not a huge issue, but it's been done without any intelligible reasoning supplied for it, and I wonder if there isn't an administrative remedy for this apparent vandalism. Activist (talk) 02:46, 4 September 2017 (UTC)


 * @Activist -- it is partisan vandalism. Page protection needed. Quis separabit?  03:09, 4 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Protection policy: This seems to be a marginal case for "semi-protection":  See the comments by User:Activist above.


 * This is a biography of a living person that is receiving some vandalism.


 * How many incidents of vandalism can you document? If it's only 3, I don't know if the Administrators would want to apply "semi-protection".
 * See also Rough guide to semi-protection.
 * It's a biography of a living person, but is the level of vandalism annoying or actually disruptive? If it's only annoying, I think Wikipedia policy is to tolerate it.  If it's disruptive, then the page should be semi-protected -- if I read the policy correctly.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:21, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Canfield and "groups most likely to be affected by Kobach's plan"
Can we delete the discussion of the Canfield case -- or at least introduce a paragraph break between that and the discussion of the lawsuit filed by "groups most likely to be affected by Kobach's plan"?

This article is long, and the jury verdict against Canfield makes a reader wonder why we are mentioning it. When the case was still pending it seemed relevant, given Kobach's other behaviors.

I don't feel I know this article well enough to make these changes, especially since User:Activist and others are so active on this page. DavidMCEddy (talk) 11:02, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

I agree that the whole paragraph should be struck. The jury verdict will not be appealed. The judge last year cut the lawsuit back substantially, denying three out of four causes of action, and retaining the dismissed suit is not going to be helpful in understanding the subject of the article. I didn't want to remove it without feedback from others and wanted to get the verdict in if it was kept, but I'm comfortable with eliminating the section entirely. Thanks for your input on this article. I'll go ahead and delete it. Activist (talk) 00:07, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Arpaio and Kobach
I think I agree with the deletion of the discussion about Arpaio. Kobach was a well-paid attorney for Arpaio BEFORE he became Kansas Secretary of State, if I read this correctly. (Joe Arpaio's Nativist Attorney Kris Kobach Gets $300 Per Hour, Plus Expenses, Plus Air Fare, to Advise MCSO) DavidMCEddy (talk) 00:57, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Kobach has a lengthy and considerable history of encouraging the passage of laws, and the filing of lawsuits, then he gets paid huge sums for representing the officials, states or municipalities in the suits he's helped to generate. See the Farmers Branch, TX, cases, for instance, a town that had to pass a tax measure to pay for his legal services and court costs. His promoting Arpaio's policies and practices, and his involvement and assurances in the passage of the largely stricken down SB 1070, Arizona's "Breathing while Brown" law, helped to get Arpaio criminally convicted. His giving initial bad advice has been quite lucrative for him. (State Senate President Russ Pearce, the sponsor of 1070, that Kobach wrote, was ousted in a recall after the measure exploded.)Activist (talk) 05:19, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * The $23 million figure was concocted by Kobach, as the amount of remittances. He gave no source for that claim, so the edit is perfectly sound. Activist (talk) 05:22, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry. I was running between planes and having nightmares getting fights with gate changes, etc. The "$23," was $23 billion in remittances by undoc workers to which Kobach referred, not million, and which neither he nor the reporter sourced. Activist (talk) 20:19, 7 September 2017 (UTC)


 * What $23 million are you talking about? Is it in the article?
 * Do you have more examples than just what's in the article? Is there enough for a separate article on something like "Kobach's recommended laws" that could be summarized in a pithy table to shorten this article with the details in the other article?  [If you want to create something like this as a separate article, it would need to be well developed before it was officially "created", because Wikipedia has an active "speedy deletion" procedure.  It would also be wise, I think, to create a "Talk" page for the new article immediately after creating the article.  This "Talk" would need to explain why it's relevant and why it really is written from a neutral point of view citing credible sources and is NOT a liberal attack on a leading conservative:  Kobach really has encouraged governmental entities to adopt laws that have been partially or totally struck down on judicial review, while making substantial money for himself.  This case would need to be spelled out clearly, concisely, and compellingly in the associated "Talk" page, I think, to avoid "speedy deletion", as I mentioned.]
 * I'm envisioning a summary table with multiple columns:
 * governmental entity
 * brief discussion of the law
 * date enacted
 * summary of judicial decisions


 * Is judicial action still pending?
 * want is known about his legal fees in proposing and then defending (largely unsuccessfully) the law. [This might even be two separate columns -- if you can actually find the data.  If you get an offline draft of this and need help with numbers like this, you might write to authors or journals that have published material like this, asking if the might like to file FOIA request(s) and publish something on this.  Wikipedia does not publish original research -- though Wikiversity does.]
 * This is probably more than can reasonably be done. However, if "Kobach has a lengthy and considerable history" as you claim, then a summary table like this with details in a separate article could be an important addition to the national debate.  The table and the details could be in a separate article.  Then the most of the details could be removed from this article and replaced by the summary table.
 * The current article is rather long and loses some of its punch, because it's too long, I think. DavidMCEddy (talk) 09:38, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I think that your idea would vastly improve the article, but I'm not aware that any reporter has ever touched on the subject as a long-term strategy of Kobach, or even simply his "small l" lobbying to get various actors to file suits that pay off hugely for him personally and fiscally in the long run. So we could compile it, but it would be OR of course, so off limits. Activist (talk) 20:19, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I added a great deal of information about lawsuit costs and fees tendered to Kobach, avoiding OR, and deleted many redundancies and errors, but have not created a table as what I'd done took far longer than I anticipated as I discovered quite an existing mess. I'm hugely behind on my actual non-Wikipedia tasks, so will have to back off a bit. Activist (talk) 07:22, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Uninformative edit
Why is it interesting that "Kobach failed to appear for the hearing but he was supported by an official whom Kobach had appointed to a government post"?

I don't know what point you are trying to make, but this line says nothing to me. In fact, it detracts from the article, I think. For me at least, it adds more confusion than clarity.

I appreciate your work on this article. DavidMCEddy (talk) 09:38, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

The original edit, somewhat vague, wasn't mine. I'll chase this one down further. Normally Kobach (whose name I accidentally shortened) does his own court work, and was a law professor for years, so it's odd that he left the defense in such a critical case to someone else, I'm guessing. Thanks for your own considerable work on this article. Activist (talk) 20:19, 7 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks. You may know that this article has gotten over 60,000 views during the past 90 days, averaging 669 per day (per History > "Page view statistics").  Your efforts doubtless made the article easier to read and more credible.
 * One minor point: I don't think one should words like "Currently" in Wikipedia articles, because articles in Wikipedia are not dated and could be incorrect by the time some people read it.
 * I checked your reference and reworded the sentence that began, "Kobach is currently of counsel with the Immigration Law Reform Institute": It now starts, 'As of September 2017, Kobach was listed as "Of counsel" by IRLI".  If you don't like that, feel free to reword it in a way that will still be accurate after Kobach ceases to be "Of council" with IRLI.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:09, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually, when I was working my way through the many edits on the article last night, at one point I deleted the "currently," because I did not know if he was still "of counsel," with IRLI, and wanted to first verify it. I thought that given his multiple roles as the KS SoS and vice chair of the Presidential commission, he might have severed the relationship to avoid the appearance of a possible conflict of interest. When I went back to the IRLI site, I discovered that the existing cite was from the Wayback Machine, preserving the utility of an otherwise dead URL, but that it had been superseded by a current, similar URL, and the relationship (i.e., as neither a "partner," nor an "associate" of the firm) persisted, so he could still bill hours through the firm. So only then did I restore the "currently" terminology and replaced the six-year-old cite with the newer one. I greatly appreciate your comments of course. I expected it was getting many views, but couldn't imagine it was that many, about two per minute for the three months. While I was at it, I noted that the existing citation of the story regarding the hearing clarified why his non-appearance was so "notable," though whomever added the less precise original edit did not include that critical info. Activist (talk) 19:10, 10 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Since you mentioned 'why his non-appearance was so "notable,"' I still don't get it: Are you referring to the following:  "Although his office was in the building adjacent to the courthouse, Kobach failed to appear for the hearing and answer questions. Instead his request was supported by a Shawnee county elections official whom Kobach had appointed"?  I could think of any number of reasons why a busy executive like Kobach may ask someone else to appear for him.  Had the plaintiffs gotten a subpoena, that could be a different story.
 * I'm not an attorney, but it's my understanding that legislators and probably other elected officials cannot be prevented from attending to their official duties. I believe that law enforcement can imprison a legislator when the legislature is not in session but not otherwise.  If I remember correctly, during the Impeachment of Bill Clinton, he was deposed, but I think that was in his office -- and I'm not sure he was even legally required to take his time to answer those questions in that way.  He was not required to appear before the U.S. House or Senate.
 * I think you weaken the overall argument with a discussion of his no-appearance for a specific hearing. DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:10, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Kobach was holed up next door literally and deliberately avoiding an extremely important hearing about his own prime disenfranchisement initiative. The state was being sued for something he was trying to do. If he wanted to be there, and it was being held on the moon, he might have tried to arrange something with NASA to get there. He's someone who took the state police plane to fly himself and a preacher for free, thousands of miles to a friend's funeral. The guy he almost certainly sent to the hearing was a local, not a state official, who had remote, if any, standing in the case and essentially appeared only as a volunteer witness. He had been appointed to his day job by Kobach as SoS (just as he had appointed Brian Newby in Johnson county). Immediately following the hearing Kobach gave an extensive press interview, as is recorded in part in the cited hearing story, written by the capitol's paper of record long-time political reporter, which also notes that Kobach disenfranchised 20,000 people (86% of suspended applicants) who had intended to vote in the previous election, only 3,691 satisfying his arguably pointless requirements. Obviously, I'm not making the situation clear enough. Have you any thoughts about how it might be made better? It's important and definitely should be in there, in my opinion and I'm concerned that it be perfectly clear and remain NPOV to Wikipedia readers. Thanks for your critical eye. Activist (talk) 21:32, 10 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Great. How can we say that in a way that is clear, concise and compelling?  For example, did one of the reports on that say what you are saying?  DavidMCEddy (talk) 21:46, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
 * It's not all said (especially the "moon landing" part). I suspect that the reporter, Tim Carpenter, left much of it for the paper's reader to easily read between the lines. Since he's on staff, he's not being paid by the word either. (Old reporter joke.) Take a look at the story and let me know what you think. There may be another source which comments, the McClatchy papers, or the AP, which give good coverage to doings in the Capitol. I'll take a look. Activist (talk) 23:31, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

Can we merge his "legal career" and "political career" sections?
It's very difficult to navigate the article when it's not chronological and when the same issue appears in both of these sections. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 10:31, 8 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I'll take a look. Activist (talk) 04:01, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I merged the "Early life" section with the "Personal life" section and supplied a previously requested citation, for starters, and will try to consolidate the two sections. His "legal career" and "political career" seem somewhat inextricable. Making the chronology more clear might present some difficulties. Activist (talk) 04:41, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I cleaned up many misspellings including of acronyms, bad cites, dead urls, redundancies, etc., which took considerable time, and added some requested info regarding the costs of failed suits. I hadn't realized what a considerable mess it was. I still need to delete more redundant info and perhaps consolidate sections. Activist (talk) 06:58, 10 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I note that User SlackerDelphi who was scrubbing this article of negative information about its subject, was banned for sockpuppetry eight weeks ago. He or she has been permanently blocked under different User names for years. Activist (talk) 20:26, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

nine convictions not in the lede
An anonymous editor deleted the following from the lede, saying, "No, not in lede":


 * Despite considerable investigation and prosecution, Kobach secured only nine convictions for voter fraud. All were cases of double voting; most were older Republican men who had misunderstood their voting rights, and not one would have been prevented by his strict voter ID "SAFE" Act.

My reaction is as follows:
 * 1) I accept that this may be too much detail for the lede, but I think the lede should include some briefer summary.  Perhaps something like the following should be added to the previous paragraph:  "[how many?] months after receiving prosecutorial powers, the only Secretary of State in the nation with such authority, he had successfully convicted nine individuals for double voting, none of which would have been prevented by the voter ID laws he has championed, as discussed further below."
 * 2) The discussion of Kobach's prosecutorial record in the body of the article says six convictions.  That should be updated -- unless the information that was deleted was erroneous.

However, I am not sufficiently familiar with the literature on this to feel comfortable making these edits myself. I trust someone else will.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:07, 22 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Thanks for reverting the questionable edit.
 * However, it does not address the point I just made about the inconsistency between the lede and the body: Nine v. six convictions.
 * Also, as I mentioned above, I'd rather see the discussion in the body updated and the point in the lede made a little shorter and more appropriate for a lede. This may not be possible:  The section Snooganssnoogans restored is 44 words vs. 46 for the alternative I suggested above.  We agree that it does not seem appropriate to accept this anonymous change.  However, I think his / her concern deserves some discussion, not just a reversion.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:08, 22 November 2017 (UTC)


 * Feel free to revert me and come up with an alternative. I have never had a problem with your editing (AFAIK) and trust that you will change the text into something more appropriate. I unfortunately don't have time to get into the weeds on Kobach at the moment. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 14:57, 22 November 2017 (UTC)

Article too long and opportunity to cut?
This article challenges the upper limit for readability. On 2017-12-07 Article size says "A page of about 30 kB to 50 kB of readable prose, which roughly corresponds to 4,000 to 10,000 words, takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed, which is right on the limit of the average concentration span of 40 to 50 minutes (information about a given page's size can be viewed by visiting the page and then clicking on the "Page information" link in the left column)." This "Page information" says this Kobach article is 107,308 bytes or 107 kB -- twice the upper limit of 50 kB. When I copied the text from Wikipedia and pasted it into LibreOffice, it came to 9,000 words = ten percent below the 10,000 word upper limit just mentioned.

Article size continues, "At 50 kB and above it may be beneficial to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries ... Comprehension of standard texts at average reading speed is around 65%." I wonder if comprehension of longer articles may be less than from shorter articles?

In any event, I think this article could be improved by judiciously making sure that long sections are adequately described in separate articles and then replacing those long sections by pithy summaries. A major candidate for that, I think, is the section on "Commission on Election Integrity": I think it could be cut by a factor of five or ten, after making sure that all the points made in that section are included in the "Main article: Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity" cited at the first of that section. Perhaps I shouldn't say anything, because other commitments prevent me from accepting this task in the near future. I mention it hoping that someone else more familiar with this article than I am will be inspired by these comments to take on this task -- and do a better job with it than I could.

Thanks to User:BD2412 for fixing a broken link to "Department of Justice" in that section. DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:23, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
 * The article is actually not out of line with the length of articles for public figures. Granted, it is longer than many articles of people of more prominent office, but it is much shorter than the typical article on a President, Vice President, or Secretary of State, for example. bd2412  T 16:33, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

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Contempt of court in Fish v. Kobach
I think this article should be updated to mention the $!,000 fine Kobach was assessed in 2017 for contempt of court and the special March 20 contempt hearing following oral arguments in Fish v. Kobach.

Sadly, I don't have the time to do this myself. I just updated the Fish v. Kobach article. The recent contempt hearing is vividly described in an AP article in the Lawrence Journal-World and in an article published by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. DavidMCEddy (talk) 06:48, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

what's "c/e" and deleting mention of GOP caging


What's "c/e" and why are you collaborating with 100.16.235.90 in deleting, "The Republican National Committee (RNC) sent out 130,000 letters to voters in majority-black parts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the intent of caging voters in those Democrat strongholds. "

Let me guess regarding the latter: It's not obvious how this relates to Kobach? (I just checked: The article supports the claim of GOP caging but does not mention Kobach.)

I'm still confused re. "c/e". Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 18:59, 8 August 2018 (UTC)


 * @DavidMCEddy -- David -- "c/e" just means copyedit,. Actually, I was trying to figure out who had added the following but I couldn't find the right diff: "The Republican National Committee (RNC) sent out 130,000 letters to voters in majority-black parts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the intent of caging voters in those Democrat strongholds. " In any event, the text in question cannot stand for the very reasons which you yourself cite. Yours,  Quis separabit?  19:15, 8 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I agree with User:TimmyTurnerTripFag:  "This is one of the most biased-sounding articles I've ever read for any elected politician in any party". I also agree with President Trump:  We have a problem with 'fake news' (though I totally disagree with Trump on the nature of the problem and what do about it).  If we had more honest media, people like Kobach would get much less traction.  For more on that, see Everyone's favorite news site.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:15, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

This is one of the most biased-sounding articles I've ever read for any elected politician in any party
Not even kidding here, the whole bloated article reads like one long opposition research piece, looking for any and everything negative that can be plastered up. TimmyTurnerTripFag (talk) 07:51, 8 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I agree -- except for one very important thing: Do you have any credible source(s) that say(s) anything different?
 * You probably know that almost anyone can change almost anything on Wikipedia. What stays tends to be written from a neutral point of view, citing credible sources.  As of 2018-08-08 this article includes 190 notes.
 * Wikipedia accepts anonymous contributions (identified by IP address) to most articles. You may know that you can view the "Revision history" by clicking the "View history" tab.  When I did this just now, I found for example that on 2018-08-07T01:50:34‎ Corkythehornetfan summarized a change s/he made saying, "removed unsourced content". Another edit at 2018-08-04T17:21:29‎ from IP address 58.152.249.162 said "This is contentious material and it does not accurately reflect the sources cited" to explain why s/he removed some text.
 * If you can identify anything in this article that says something that is not supported by a reliable source, please delete it. If you find something supported by a source that is not reliable, challenge it on this Talk page and delete it.  If you find something that could be reworded in a way that seems less biased and does not distort what's in a credible source that is cited, reword it.
 * For me the most credible source on Mr. Kobach is "Findings of fact and conclusions of law in Fish v. Koback, 2018-06-18 by Judge, who was appointed to the bench by (Republican) President at a time when both US Senators from Kansas and three of the four representatives in the US House from Kansas were Republicans:
 * These Findings of fact and conclusions of law are also summarized in the Wikipedia article on Fish v. Kobach: That, too, might look biased to someone unfamiliar with the case and the available evidence.  However, I wrote most of that article, and I worked hard to ensure that what I wrote was a fair and balanced summary of the available evidence.  I'm not perfect, and I'm confident the article can be improved.  However, I would argue that while it and this main article on Mr. Kobach may look biased to someone unfamiliar with the available evidence, they are not biased (or not nearly as biased as they may appear), because they accurately reflect the available evidence.
 * Moreover, I think that judicial proceeding in the US tend on average for most things to be less biased than just about any other source, especially for issues involving people with money and power. Mr. Kobach is an attorney, who taught law for a while at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.  Judge Robinson held him in contempt of court for numerous things, including trying to introduce evidence in court that he was legally obligated to provide the plaintiffs during discovery and failed to do.  He tried that multiple times until Judge Robinson said, "We're not going to have a trial by ambush here";  see the quote in Fish v. Kobach.  Judge Robinson also found, for example, that Mr. Kobach's expert witness Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, essentially cherry picked his evidence to fit his preconceived conclusion and was not credible.
 * Mr. Kobach's ELVIS [the Kansas Election Voter Information System] included "400 individuals [with] birth dates after their date of registration, indicating they registered to vote before they were born. ... The voting rate among purported noncitizen registrations on [a Kansas temporary drivers license] match list is around 1%, whereas the voting rate among registrants in Kansas more generally is around 70%.”
 * Judge Robinson concluded that Mr. Kobach's "massive" problem with voting by individuals not legally allowed to vote was not an "iceberg" as Kobach claimed, but "an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error."
 * Thanks for your expression of concern. DavidMCEddy (talk) 09:36, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your expression of concern. DavidMCEddy (talk) 09:36, 8 August 2018 (UTC)


 * TimmyTurnerTripFag, I agree. I would add that the article is unbalanced, is far too long, includes non-notable material, and is sloppily written. I have made some edits to try to solve the problem. I am tagging the article now. For one thing, it would be nice if someone who knows something about Kobach could add something about things he has done in office that don't relate to election issues or immigration. SunCrow (talk) 04:07, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Opening Section
The entire opening is quite specific in criticizing individual items in Kobach's past. If anything, wouldn't all that belong somewhere within the entry itself?

Nelamm (talk) 12:21, 13 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I combined the two paragraphs in the lede (the introduction before the first named section) with the section on "Sanctuary city claims", renaming that section '2018 election and Kansas as "sanctuary state"', and then shrunk the mention of that in the lede to a single sentence.
 * Does that address your concern?
 * If no, could you please be more specific -- and preferably be bold but not reckless in trying to fix yourself the problem you perceive? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 14:16, 13 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Nelamm, I agree. Please check out my recent edits and see if you think they solve the problem. Thanks. SunCrow (talk) 04:03, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

I guess I could still quibble with it, but it's much better. Thanks to both of you for your efforts.

Nelamm (talk) 05:57, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

2018 Kansas Gubernatorial Primary
On 2018-09-13 the section on "2018 Kansas gubernatorial election" included the following:


 * On August 7, 2018, Kobach appeared headed for victory over incumbent Governor Jeff Colyer in the Republican gubernatorial primary by an initial margin of 191 votes. By August 9, 2018, his lead stood at 121 votes, however, after tabulation was revised by some counties, Kobach finished with a 350-vote margin.

I feel this is more detail than is needed here, especially since this article is already rather long AND there is a separate section on this election. I'm changing the word "election" to "primary" in the section title and shortening this paragraph while keeping all the references as follows:


 * On August 7, 2018, Kobach defeated incumbent Governor Jeff Colyer in the Republican gubernatorial primary in a tight vote. Kobach finished with a 350-vote margin.

The extra detail may be appropriate in the separate article on this election; I have not checked to see if it's there -- but I retained all the text and references here in case they are not already in that separate article. DavidMCEddy (talk) 00:43, 14 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I've made corrections, added a new section, and I believe for readers' convenience, retained text that is germane to both articles. I also augmented the Greg Orman article which was sadly out of date. Activist (talk) 10:34, 14 September 2018 (UTC)

Area of expertise as professor?
What was Kobach's area of expertise as a professor at the UMKC law school? In what area(s) did he publish and prefer to teach? I've changed the title of "Early life and education" section to "Early life, education, and academic career" as a place to hold that information.CountMacula (talk) 20:58, 8 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Might you have the time to research his publication record with, e.g., Google Scholar? And then asking that question of people currently on the UMKC law faculty, who were there when Kobach was, sharing whatever you find?  This could be a valuable addition to this article.
 * I heard an unsubstantiated claim from someone who said he took a class from Kobach at that time, and Kobach "never came to class." Obviously, that kind of scurrilous assertion cannot be quoted as evidence for Wikipedia, but it might justify a serious search for what you are asking.
 * DavidMCEddy (talk) 00:40, 10 November 2018 (UTC)

Missionary, Get Ahead Foundation
I found a dead URL cited for Kobach's involvement in building a school in South Africa. However, the actual article only mentions the foundation in passing and does not mention Kobach. Should this assertion and the citation be removed? What kind of missionary was Kobach? Activist (talk) 00:02, 27 November 2018 (UTC)


 * I suggest you wait for at least 24 hours and maybe search for some other reference on that. If you find nothing and no one else comes up with a solid reference for this, I recommend you delete that sentence, as you suggested.  2601:285:200:AFD0:7102:E242:36E4:78B7 (talk) 06:50, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

"Personal Information"
Would the following two sentences better belong in the section on "Early life", or should they remain where they are in Personal Life? While I know that it is common practice in Wikipedia to place information about a person's childhood in the section on early life, there may be a consensus concerning this article that I am not aware of.

"Kobach was born in Madison, Wisconsin, to Janice Mardell (née Iverson) and William Louis Kobach.[197][198] His great-grandparents were Bohemian and German on his father's side and Norwegian on his mother's side; they came to Wisconsin in the 1890s, where they were mostly farmers.[199][200]

At the age of seven, in 1974, Kobach moved to Kansas with his parents and two sisters, and grew up mostly in Topeka where his father owned the Bill Kobach Buick-GMC car dealership.[201][202]"

Thanks. Mgasparin (talk) 02:48, 8 April 2019 (UTC)


 * I know of no reason to leave it where it is.
 * The current article contains the phrase, "Kobach was born" in two places. They should be merged.  Indeed, the bit about his great-grandparents should go with "Early life" not the later "Personal life".
 * Be bold but not reckless. Changes like those you suggest seem like a wise improvement to the article. DavidMCEddy (talk) 06:34, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 22:21, 15 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Kris Kobach official photo.jpg

Extensive POV edits by IP editor promoting WeBuildTheWall project
I've deleted the five POV edits by an IP editor from southern Florida composing 1,023 bytes of entirely unsourced promotional material regarding the WeBuildtheWall project for which Kobach serves as general counsel. I think page protection should be considered. Activist (talk) 00:51, 9 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I'm listed as watching this page.  I don't know why I didn't see these changes.
 * However, they are all stamped between 2019-06-06T14:47:48‎ and 2019-06-06T23:34:53‎, and your reversions are stamped between 2019-06-08T00:02:30‎ and 2019-06-08T00:13:53‎, and it's now 2019-06-09T01:55.
 * I suggest we let it ride for the moment. If you see more material crudely like this by an IP editor, then I suggest you try Requests for page protection.  They might not respond now, since it's more than 24 hours after your last reversion and more than 49 hours since the last of these IP changes.  However, if you get another one, especially fairly soon, I think the people who manage Requests for page protection would likely apply semi-protection.  The oldest request there is stamped 2019-06-08T21:03, just over 5 hours ago.  You should not have to wait for days to get a response.
 * Thanks for all you do. DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:08, 9 June 2019 (UTC)

White supremacy
There seems to be a revert war over Kobach's well-documented ties to white supremacists. Before this page has to be locked, could one of the vandals use the talk feature here to explain their reasoning?Josh Rosenau (talk) 20:33, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

The Southern Poverty Law Center's smear campaign against Kobach is ridiculous. The SPLC attempts to tie him to white supremacists through six degrees of separation. (Kobach litigates for IRLI, which shares a board member with FAIR, which has Jon Tanton as a member, and an associate of Tanton wrote some questionable statements.) Any person on the planet can be tied to white supremacists in this way. Such libel should not be republished on Wikipedia, which would be exposed to potential liability for republishing it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hm911 (talk • contribs) 15:37, 10 August 2010 (UTC)


 * The deletion of references to Kobach's ties to white supremacy is inappropriate. The references were well-documented, and were widely reported.  Whether or not you like it, it is not libelous and it did contribute to Kobach's notoriety.  I'm reverting your deletion of those references.Josh Rosenau (talk) 09:47, 10 September 2010 (UTC)


 * On 2019-06-18T06:14:32 User:2605:a000:1105:c297:dc69:da1f:efa6:7acf inserted a new reference saying that Kobach was a white supremacist, citing an article in the Kansas City Star, still the leading newspaper of the Kansas City metro area:




 * That's an extreme statement to make. The Star article seemed not to make that allegation directly but published material from which the claim was an obvious conclusion.  Then on 2019-06-18T21:26:38‎  reverted that change.
 * My conclusion: While the label seems justified, I think the general text is likely more effective without using that label.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:09, 19 June 2019 (UTC)

External Links section does not include Kobach-for-senate links
As of right now, it looks like the external links section does not include Kobach's 2020 senate campaign page, although maybe i just can't see it.

That would be https://kriskobach.com/

Son of eugene (talk) 16:01, 2 November 2019 (UTC)


 * The first option in that section is " ".  Clicking on that on the main article redirects to the website you indicated, https://kriskobach.com. That says "Kobach U.S. Senate".  I cannot find "2020" on that site, but About > "Meet Kris" says, "After stepping down from the office of Secretary of State in January 2019, ... ."  It's clearly talking about this US Senate race.  DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:42, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
 * Earlier I added to external links and  to the infobox website param. after 's message. – Archer1234 (talk) 17:07, 2 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Thanks. DavidMCEddy (talk) 17:09, 2 November 2019 (UTC)

Relevance of estimates of the rates of actual voter fraud
Someone added a flag after a comment that, "A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. "

Claims of voter fraud seem to have been a key feature of Mr. Kobach's rise to statewide and national prominence. It seems quite appropriate to me that a section on "Prosecutions of voter fraud" in this article end by citing a credible source like the Brennan Center for Justice. I am therefore removing that "relevance" flag. DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:54, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Inappropriate deletions of solidly sourced comments by anonymous user(s)
On 2020-07-26T17:45:54‎, user:86.4.155.106 made changes claiming, "I just changed a few sentences to make more accurate". In fact, the deletions all seemed to be to delete references and comments, e.g.,


 * that studies and fact-checkers have concluded are false or unsubstantiated.

This was followed by another change by another(?) anonymous user:2600:1700:4480:a3d0:447d:d167:86fe:48d5, that deleted another seemingly well-documented comment about Mr. Kobach, without explanation. In my judgment, these changes are entirely inappropriate. I'm reverting them all. DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:13, 26 July 2020 (UTC)

Regarding removal of long standing text 1 day prior to primary involved.
Text was removed regarding content that had stood since a May 22, 2020 debate. The other debaters focused on Kobach, who responded. Since the edits about it were made, 60,000 viewers have seen the page, 40,000 in the last month, 10,000 in the last three days. No one had a problem with the material that was removed save for the newish removing editor. The primary will be held tomorrow and Wikipedia readers should not be deprived of this content. I read the entire deletion and believe it should instead stand. Please seek consensus for future removal. Activist (talk) 08:08, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Reorganization
I think this article could benefit from a reorganization. I say this without detailed study but just from concerns aroused by the following addition:


 * In 2013, the League of Women Voters joined a challenge to Kobach's "proof of citizenship" requirements for Kansas Voters.

My first reaction to this addition is that this looks to me like what ultimately became the Fish v. Kobach case, but it is separated from the section of this article on that case without mentioning that case. However, I don't feel I know enough to easily develop a sensible way to fix this concern.

Then I noticed the article seems rather long. To check that, I clicked, "View history" > "Page statistics". Then I scrolled down to the "Prose" heading. Just below that, I read, "Characters 79,776". (I'm writing this on 2020-10-09.)

For reference I checked, Article size, which contains the following table:

Might someone have the time and interest to Be bold with this article in reorganizing it with the target of cutting its size in half?

If I were doing this, I might look for two things:


 * Might some section(s) that refer to separate articles, like the "Fish v. Kobach trial" section, be substantially reduced?


 * Could some of this be split into separate article or articles? For example, might it make sense to create a new article on "Kris Kobach's political career" containing everything in the current "Political career" section, and then cutting that section here dramatically.


 * One simple thing might be to put the section on "Electoral history" in a separate article (probably with "Kris Kobach's political career"), then retain here only the results of the most recent elect. (Also, I would put election results in reverse chronological order:  I think most people would likely be most concerned about the most recent election, so put that first.)


 * Before starting on this, I think the right editor might print this article and think about how best to organize the information so it flowed more gracefully and the most important points might most easily be grasped.

Regarding the recent addition, " In 2013, the League of Women Voters joined a challenge to Kobach's ...", I think it lacks context. Who made the first challenge, when? What happened to that challenge subsequently?

Secondarily, the section on "Proof of citizenship requirement laws" begins, "From 2013–2015, more than 36,000 Kansas residents (14% of those trying to register to vote) were placed on a suspense list". I agree with the [clarification needed] tag. At minimum, this comment should have a citation. However, it might be better to rewrite the entire paragraph. Might the same thing be said more clearly in fewer words?

Thanks to all who put so much work into this article. This issues discussed here are still relevant to today's politics, I think. For example, the continued attacks on vote by mail by President Trump and others, I think, highlight the need to make it easier for readers to access the information summarized in this article. I'm extremely selective about what I read, and I rarely read every word of articles this long. A good job of editing could make the most important parts of this article more accessible to the public without losing any of the history documented herein. DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:32, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Far Right and White Nationalist Ties
It has been properly sourced with reputable sources that Kris Kobach is a far right voice in conservative politics, and that his campaign staffers have ties to White Nationalists. So why the reverts on accurate information? Frankly, it's only coming from one editor (KidAd). Marshan3q 11:14, 14 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I concur. If you think Kobach is NOT a fact-free zone, please read Judge Robinson's .  (talk) 23:46, 14 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Per WP:LEDE, a lede must identify the topic and summarize the body of the article with appropriate weight. That does not mean name-dropping unsavory individuals within the first two sentences of the article and then never providing context the body text. What you have written clearly violates WP:UNDUE and WP:BLPBALANCE. Also, per WP:ONUS, the onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. That means self-reverting and gaining consensus in this discussion. KidAd  •  SPEAK  01:49, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I agree with the edits made by DavidMCEddy, KidAd  and Marshan3q and completed bare URLs. Activist (talk) 02:11, 15 July 2021 (UTC)


 * How did your deletions make the lede a better summary of the contents? I appreciate your efforts to improve Wikipedia, but in this case, I think your edits, not those of user:Marshan3q violated the policies on "WP:UNDUE", "WP:BLPBALANCE", and "WP:ONUS".  DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:28, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
 * The lede must summarize the body. It is WP:UNDUE to insert contentious material in the first two sentences of a very long article without any further reference in the body text. And sorry, but what is it that you misunderstand about WP:ONUS? That policy is clear. The onus to achieve consensus for inclusion is on those seeking to include disputed content. In this case, that is "Marshan3q". I am entirely willing to help them re-write and organize their material so it can better fit in the article, but they are clearly violating that policy by not self-reverting. KidAd  •  SPEAK  02:40, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

The edits starting on 14 July are really problematic with respect to BLP violations. The added claims about ties to malitia orgs appears to be supported by Truthout, a twitter link and a local news article that doesn't appear to mention Kobach. The "far-right" in the lead is supported by only one source. It may be true but we should be careful about using such labels. It's better to let the facts in the article support the conclusion rather than trying to state it based on one source. KidAd was right to revert the edits. Springee (talk) 03:40, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
 * To be clear I support reverting to the pre-July lead. There is not consensus for this change.  KidAd, it may be worth taking this to BLPN to get some additional eyes on the subject.  Springee (talk) 03:43, 15 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, . I hope that someone will restore the most stable version of the article, though I am unable to do so without violating WP:3RR. I will also look into the possibility of taking this to WP:BLPN or WP:NPOVN to resolve the issue. KidAd  •  SPEAK  04:48, 15 July 2021 (UTC)