Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline said the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) investigation into New Jersey’s registration of roughly 6,600 noncitizens to vote should expand well beyond the Garden State, arguing the case exposes broader vulnerabilities in the nation’s election system.
Kline made the remarks during Thursday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show, after the DOJ demanded New Jersey officials turn over records related to the noncitizen registrations and approximately 400 ballots cast by individuals affected by the state’s voter registration error.
“It’s remarkable to see the overall response to President Trump’s address,” Kline said, referring to President Donald Trump’s recent address to the nation highlighting election integrity concerns.
Using an analogy, Kline argued critics have minimized what he believes are significant election security issues.
“It’s like he called the police and said, ‘Look, somebody’s broken into our home,’ and that somebody is China and others who’ve infiltrated and pilfered identities from the voter rolls and so forth, and the first response of the left and the mainstream media is, one, not to show up… or to say, ‘Wait a minute, we don’t know that China had ill intent or that there really is a problem with this,’” Kline explained.
Kline continued the analogy by saying, “The police show up, they look at your back door, it’s been smashed in, the glass is all broken on the floor, and they say they might not have meant to harm you, and I don’t think anything has been stolen. Go inside and investigate.”
He argued election officials have long failed to adequately address vulnerabilities in voter registration systems.
“We’ve discussed this through the years. We have a big open door for people to hack our voting rolls. That’s been demonstrated for decades now. Russia did it. China did it. And in fact, in the 2020 election, blue state election officials gave out electronic access to our registration rolls to private nonprofits, and nobody’s audited who they enrolled or registered to vote,” Kline said.
While Kline said New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill “seems to be cooperating” with the federal investigation, he maintained the underlying issue extends beyond a single state.
“The governor of New Jersey was caught in the problem. She seems to be cooperating, but the problem is much broader. I would hope that the Department of Justice will look at these private-public contracts like what the state of Michigan had with Rock the Vote, which allowed leftist activists to initiate voter registration electronically with greater access to the poll books than local election officials in Michigan,” he said.
“Our system—it’s wide open,” Kline added. “Unfortunately, because of this constant Trump-Biden narrative that the left keeps talking about, nobody is willing to really look at it and change it and make a difference.”
When host Leahy noted that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is investigating New Jersey, Kline remarked, “But there’s a whole lot more.”
He pointed to examples of vulnerabilities in Michigan’s voter registration system, including an affidavit from a colleague who discovered a ballot had allegedly been cast in her maiden name decades after leaving the state.
“She left Michigan about the age of 18 to go to college… has never returned to Michigan. Guess who voted at the home she resided at when she was born? She did, by her maiden name. She never even registered to vote by her maiden name, but that voter voted in the 2020 election,” he said.
Kline argued that publicly available records could be used to exploit voter registration systems.
“I can go out and I can buy change of address forms from the United States Post Office. I could buy marital records… I could create a software program that cross-references those people to where they live and their new names, and what do you think the odds are if I create a registration for that person in their maiden name at the address that they were born in a state they’ve not lived in for 30 years, that they would go back and check their voting history to see if they’re voting?… Zip,” he said.
“It is easy, relatively, to manufacture registrations or to allow non-citizens to vote,” Kline stressed.
Discussing Michigan specifically, Kline referenced an investigation into voter registration practices.
“What [Trump] raised in Michigan was an investigation by Michigan State Police that was downplayed by the FBI, in which persons were paid to go get registrations, which, paying a person per registration is going to incentivize the manufacture of registrations,” he explained.
According to Kline, similar practices were not limited to one state.
“That just doesn’t happen in Michigan. It happened in Georgia. It happened all over in the 2020 election. We had evidence of direct payments per registration in Georgia and elsewhere,” he noted.
Kline said many of the election issues he described have been known for years.
“What’s stunning to me is that this has been known. This has been known for more than a decade now… this type of stuff goes on,” he said.
Kline also criticized the use of private vendors in election administration.
“You’ve got public/private contracts for signature verification in some states where there’s no auditing of how those signatures are compared and how they are matched on absentee ballots. It’s done by private companies. There’s no transparency,” he said.
Although Kline praised Dhillon’s investigation into New Jersey, he argued legislative action is also needed.
“I appreciate her efforts. My main critique is with Congress and with state legislatures,” he said.
Kline specifically criticized the Help America Vote Act of 2002, saying Congress “essentially nationalized the elections,” while adding that it “incentivized machine use, eliminated transparency, and eliminated accountability.”
“Your local elections officials – who you vote for, who answer to you – could go to prison for accessing the software that they use to count their votes. It’s an insane setup. It’s just nuts,” he said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network.
Photo “Voter Registration and Early Voting” by Ben Schumin CC3.0
