One of those Kansans prosecuted, Randall Kilian, thought he was expressing his preference about marijuana legalization as it affected his new Colorado retirement property after receiving a mail-in ballot in 2012, when he was 59 years old. He did not want pot growing next to his home, so he marked that issue only, and mailed it in as instructed. The sheriff and county attorney of Ellis County, Kansas, learned of this and questioned Kilian. Both concluded he had not intentionally broken the law and decided not to prosecute. However, when Kobach got prosecutorial authority in such cases, a year later, he reopened the case. Trying to avoid the expense of a trial, Kilian pleaded guilty in 2016 and paid a $2,500 fine. Critics of Kobach, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, claim he overreaches on cases that district attorneys deemed not worth prosecuting, and allege that he is motivated by racism. In his 2020 U.S. Senate campaign, Kobach hired a white supremacist who had also backed his 2018 gubernatorial campaign. In 2017, while vetting Kobach as a potential appointee for the administration of Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee raised "White Supremacy" as a possible problem affecting such an action. Kobach examined 84 million votes that were cast in 22 states, but referred only 14 cases to be prosecuted. University of Kansas assistant professor of political science Patrick Miller includes voter intimidation as a form of fraud. "The substantially bigger issue with voter fraud has been election fraud being perpetrated by election officials and party officials tampering with votes ... It is not the rampant problem that the public believes that is there. Kris Kobach says it is. Donald Trump says it is. And the data just aren't there to prove it. It's a popular misconception that this is a massive problem." A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud. Kobach directed the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which compares state records to find people registered to vote in more than one place. "The New York Times" credits him with rapidly expanding the reach of the program, referred to as the "Kansas Project," which by 2017 included more than 30 states. According to the "New York Times," "The program searches for double registrations using only voters' first and last names and date of birth, and it generates thousands of false matches—John Smith in Kansas can easily be confused with John Smith in Iowa."