Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson dismissed the idea that restrictive anti-voter fraud requirements could be racist, echoing the position of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — a champion of such measures who has called accusations of racism a personal insult.
“I’ve made it my personal project, every time I visit a country outside the U.S., to ask what do they do to ensure the integrity of voting? There’s not one single country anywhere — first world, second world, it doesn’t matter — that doesn’t have official requirements for voting,” Carson said on Oct. 16.
“My question to those people who say we’re racist because we apply those standards: Are all the other countries of the world racist? I don’t think so. Voting is an important thing. Obviously, you want to make sure that it’s done by the appropriate people.”
Carson made the comments in an interview with The Topeka Capital-Journal ahead of a planned appearance in Topeka.
Kobach, who is also a Republican, drew fire from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who posted a tweet linking to a New York Times story on Kansas’ plan to purge incomplete voter registrations older than 90 days. She commented: “We should be doing everything we can to get young people more engaged in our democracy, not putting up obstacles.”
The tweet was the second time Clinton has criticized Kobach in recent months. In August, Clinton called the purge of the incomplete registrations a “targeted attack on voting rights.” In both cases, Kobach hit back, saying every non-citizen vote cancels out a citizen’s vote.
“The Hillary Clinton campaign is unhappy with the fact that Kansas has the most secure election system in the country,” Kobach said.
