Shortly after he became Kansas secretary of state in 2011, Kris Kobach wrote a Wall Street Journal commentary asserting that voter fraud was prevalent in his state and across the country.

Kansas had just passed one of the toughest voting laws in the country, requiring residents to both show a photo ID at the polls and prove their citizenship when they registered to vote. He wrote that his office had already identified 67 non-citizens registered to vote, and he estimated that it would likely identify hundreds more. To underscore his claim about rampant fraud, he alleged that 50 Somali citizens had voted for a state representative in a 2010 Kansas City, Missouri, race in which the margin of victory was just one vote.

But Kobach left out that a Missouri court had already looked at claims of voter fraud in that election and found they were not credible. The credible evidence proves that there was no voter misconduct and there was no voter fraud with regard to this election, Judge Stephen Nixon, of the Missouri Court of Appeals, wrote.

This incident constitutes just one of a number of times in which Kobach has greatly exaggerated the occurrence of fraud in an attempt to justify making it harder for people to vote. Now he has been tapped as vice chair of President Donald Trump s new Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, and activists worry that he will use his position to stoke fears that voter fraud is widespread even though it is virtually nonexistent and to lay the groundwork for voting restrictions.

Kobachs appointment is a clear signal that this effort [is] no more than a voter fraud witch-hunt like the one that took place in my home state at the behest of now-Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas), co-chair of the House Voting Rights Caucus, said in a statement Thursday. During Secretary Kobachs term, the state of Kansas implemented a severely restrictive voter ID law designed to discourage and suppress voters rather than assure fair elections. We all have reason to be wary of his intentions in leading this commission.