My local newspaper, the Topeka Capital-Journal, carries the comic strip Dilbert, which occasionally features a character known as Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services. Mordac earns his title by being so obsessed with the security of his company’s systems that he makes it essentially impossible for anyone to access them. In Kansas, we have a real-life counterpart to Mordac – Kobach, the Preventer of Voter Registration. In his excessive zeal to prevent non-citizens from being able to register to vote in Kansas, our esteemed Secretary of State has advocated policies that have prevented more than twenty thousand individuals from being able to register to vote. In a debate with his opponent in the recent election, Mr. Kobach justified this by pointing out that it had been determined that at least twelve of these individuals had been determined not to be citizens. Not twelve thousand, or twelve hundred, or even twelve dozen – twelve individuals, as compared to the twenty thousand people, deemed guilty by Mr Kobach until proven innocent, who were unable to register to vote. Mr. Kobach claims his intention is to protect the integrity of elections in Kansas, but as I see the situation, he is doing exactly the opposite. Twelve votes will seldom be enough to swing even a local election, but twenty thousand people denied the right to vote because they are unable to jump through the hoops that have been set up to make it difficult for them to do so could make a real difference in even some statewide elections. Mr. Kobach and his supporters insist that the twelve individuals they have been able to identify represent only the tip of the iceberg, and that there must be many more illegal immigrants just waiting to decide the outcome of elections in Kansas if given the opportunity to do so. I believe that the most appropriate reply to this contention is a word coined by Theodore Roosevelt – BULLfeathers. The hordes of non-citizens desperately awaiting an opportunity to hijack our elections exist only in the paranoid fantasies of the reactionary bigots who seek to use alleged voter fraud as an excuse to deny the right to vote to as many young, poor and minority voters as they can manage to disenfranchise. I have seen Mr. Kobach quoted in print as insisting that he is not a bigot. This may well be true; I do not claim to know the inner workings of his mind. However, if this really is true, then his actions suggest that he is instead an opportunistic demagogue, pandering to the bigotry of others in order to advance his own political future. In either case, it is about as appropriate to have Mr. Kobach safeguarding the voting rights of Kansans as it is to have a fox guarding a chicken coop.