Don’t you just love it when leftists respond to scandal by adopting a patronizing tone, tacitly telling critics that they are stupid? Especially when the stakes are high.

When Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State for Kansas, and Vice Chairman of the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, revealed:

1.     “…there were 6,540 same-day registrants who registered to vote in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver’s license to prove their identity.” (snip)

2.    According to New Hampshire law, a new resident has 60 days to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license. (snip)

3.    So if those 6,540 voters were bona fide New Hampshire residents, they would get their driver’s license no later than January 7, 2017. However, the numbers tell a very different story. It turns out that, as of August 30, 2017 – nearly ten months after the election – only 1,014 of the 6,540 same-day registrants who registered with an out-of-state license had obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. The other 5,526 individuals never obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. And, of those 5,526, only 213 registered a vehicle in New Hampshire.

This demonstrates that there were more than enough suspicious same-day registrations to have swung the state’s electoral votes and senatorial race to Democrats. If not proof as Kobach alleges, then certainly worthy of investigation.

Christopher Ingraham, of the Washington Post, started out with a sneer in the lede when he took on Kobach.

Writing in a paid column for far-right political media website Breitbart.com…

This is too easy:

Kind of like Christopher Ingraham writing a paid column for the newspapering/lobbying arm of one of the world’s three richest men?

Chris, you’re better than this.

In fact, Ingraham has shown in the past that he learned from a mistake he made when sneering at the peasants in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. But the perils of sneering in the absence of an understanding of human nature are not yet obvious to him.

Ingraham became famous when, in wonkish fashion, he went by the numbers (a statistical index ranking of places in America by "six measures of climate, topography, and water area that reflect environmental qualities most people prefer") and named Red Lake County, Minnesota “the absolute worst place in America.”

As anyone with common sense could foresee, this set off an avalanche with far-reaching consequences.  Ingraham subsequently admitted that he thought he was simply dashing off “a quick story…  a few hundred words, a map and some charts -- standard data journalism fare …  and called it a day.”  He had not understood human nature.

The response he got, the invitation for a visit he received, his public change of mind, and his eventual move of his family to Red Lake County, Minnesota are all recounted by the Star Tribune which calls it a story “most Minnesotans have heard — and gleefully boasted about.”

I have to admire a man who can take admitting a mistake to this level.

But on the New Hampshire data, instead of fraud, Ingraham posits;

 …there's a far simpler explanation: Most of those voters were college students from out of state, who are perfectly allowed to register and vote in New Hampshire under state law — with or without a New Hampshire driver's license.

New Hampshire Public Radio did an investigation into this very question back in February. They received data on 5,903 same-day registrants with out-of-state licenses from the secretary of state's office.

Over 4,000 of them resided in college towns, suggesting they were simply out-of-state college students. The remainder were spread more or less evenly across the state.

But Ingraham once again does not understand human nature.

Richard Baehr hits him with a dose of reality in an email:

This does not resolve the issue. If most of the voters with out-of-state drivers’ licenses were students (say 2/3), how do we know that they did not also vote in their home state, using their home address with the same state ID to vote twice?  

Should we count on their honesty?

Protections to rid the rolls of those who have died or moved, or to catch double voters in two states are close to non-existent.  There are many hundreds of thousands of people registered in two states. 

Given the fact that college education rends to indoctrinate youngsters with moral relativism and far left ideology, honesty would not be the universal response. Since political power is lusted after by many, voluntary compliance is no safeguard at all. Especially if there is no mechanism to cross check voter registration. The lure of doubling of their voting power, especially to help in a swing state, was certainly present for residents of collge towns.

That is why we need a national database to cross check voter registrations nationally. The response to Kobach’s initiative to do so has been portrayed by the MSM as overwhelmingly negative.

Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have refused to provide certain types of voter information to the Trump administration's election integrity commission, according to a CNN inquiry to all 50 states.

State leaders and voting boards across the country have responded to the letter with varying degrees of cooperation -- from altogether rejecting the request to expressing eagerness to supply information that is public.

To which Kobach responded:

Responding to news reports that 44 states had declined to cooperate with the commission’s request, Kobach called that figure “patently false, more ‘fake news’” and said 14 states and D.C. had done so, while 36 others “either agreed or are considering participating,” with 20 of those agreeing outright.

The breadth and intensity of the pushback is a strong indicator that elimination of fraud could cost the Democrats dearly. As with voter ID, all sorts of bogus arguments are marshaled, often resting on emotion, to oppose common sense safeguards that apply elsewhere when something of value may be obtained by fraud, unless prevented by enforcement of laws.

It's human nature, and progressives are convinced they can change it.