(Kansas City Star) Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said April 12 that he has obtained his first conviction of a person who illegally voted in a Kansas election without being a U.S. citizen.
Kobach, who has advised President Donald Trump on immigration and voter fraud, said that Victor David Garcia Bebek has pleaded guilty to voter fraud.
Kobach, a Republican, is the only secretary of state in the country with the authority to prosecute voter fraud.
“No matter how many cases we prosecute the political left will always whine that there’s not enough cases to justify protecting our elections in this way,” Kobach said in a phone interview. “That’s absurd.”
The conviction of Bebek was the eighth for Kobach since he gained the authority to prosecute voter fraud in 2015, his office said.
As of this March, 1,788,673 people were registered to vote in Kansas.
Kobach said the others were convictions of people who “double-voted” or were citizens who voted in Kansas and another state.
“This conviction shows how important prosecutorial authority is,” Kobach said.
Last year, Kobach was revealed as a source of Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that millions of people illegally voted in the 2016 presidential election. Kobach has offered no evidence to back up Trump’s claim of such fraud in the 2016 election.
Bebek will be on unsupervised probation for up to three years and pay a fine of $5,000, according to a statement from Kobach’s office.
Kobach found that Bebek illegally voted three times: in a 2012 special election and the 2012 and 2014 general elections. He was a Peruvian national at the time who voted in Sedgwick County, according to Kobach.
Kobach said the way the case was discovered because Bebek became a U.S. citizen earlier this year.
At his naturalization ceremony, he was offered the chance to register to vote in Sedgwick County.
“This gentleman did so, and then when the Sedgwick County election office went back to the office to enter his information, they found that he had been on the voter rolls since 2011,” Kobach said.
