Kansas bills would end grace period for mail ballots and ban ranked-choice voting

Kansas’s two election committees are fast at work in the Kansas Statehouse this year and have already had hearings on some of the more controversial election bills being considered.

Kansas has taken on a flurry of election security bills since 2020, when President Donald Trump baselessly blamed widespread voter fraud for his defeat. Some of the laws that passed in the Statehouse fell flat in the courts, namely the prohibition of “impersonating an election employee.”

Democrats have signalled that they’re not willing to work on many of the bills being considered.

“Anything that makes voting more difficult for Kansans is going to be a nonstarter with us,” said Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, D-Lenexa.

Kansas bill considers ending the ballot grace period

In 2017, the Kansas Legislature approved a three-day grace period for ballots that were sent before Election Day, but received by a county election office up to three days after the election. A bill that would make a hard deadline of 7 p.m. on Election Day for ballots was recommended to be passed by the Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs despite substantial pushback from opponents.

Identical bills have passed the Senate and House over the past few years, but they’ve failed to overcome Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto.

Election Day is the mail-ballot deadline for most states, with 32 states requiring the return of mail-in ballots as the polls close. The other 18, plus Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands allows ballots after Election Day if it is postmarked with the date it was sent.

Written testimony for the bill largely skewed oppositional, with more than 50 organizations and private citizens asking the committee to reject the bill compared to 10 proponents.

Proponents argued that the U.S. Postal Service postmarks are unreliable, would speed up tabulation and would make elections more secure.

“Nothing in this bill does anything to change voters access. Kansas makes it very easy to vote. This law would also make it harder to cheat,” said Jason Sneed, executive director of Honest Elections Action Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for tougher election security laws.

Sneed previously managed the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database, which found 16 cases of voter fraud in Kansas since 2005.

Opponents included several civil rights groups and civic organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters and the Disability Rights Center. Opponents argued that the bill was uncontroversial when it passed in 2017, and responded to delayed USPS service that has only gotten worse since. Some also said this would throw out ballots and cause confusion among voters.

“Could you tell me your mail delivery time? How long it’s going to take for any letters? You don’t know,” said Davis Hammet, president of the youth voter access and engagement advocate Loud Light. “Weather events can happen that create mail delays that are outside of anyone’s control. So this is just a common sense simple thing. It’s about protecting people from some of the failures of the federal government.”

Ann Mah, former Democratic representative from Topeka and former Kansas State Board of Education member, called the bill “pure voter suppression” of Democrats, who are more likely to vote by mail than Republicans.

The bill was also opposed by the Kansas County Clerks and Election Officials Association, which represents the county clerks and election officials in the state.

“Most properly mailed advance ballots are returned the day after the election but diminishing quantities continue to be received after Election Day,” said Rick Piepho, the elections committee chair of the KCCEOA.

An identical bill, House Bill 2017, is submitted to the House, but so far the House Elections Committee hasn’t scheduled a hearing on it.

Bill would ban ranked-choice voting in Kansas

Sen. Mike Thompson, R-Shawnee, introduced a bill that would ban ranked-choice voting in Kansas, which hasn’t been adopted by any city thus far. Current state law doesn’t have a method for ranked-choice voting outlined in statute, meaning cities couldn’t do it unless lawmakers passed a law allowing it according to the Kansas Revisor of Statutes.

Madeline Malisa, a visiting fellow at Opportunity Solutions Project, argued that ranked-choice voting has been a “nightmare” in Maine, where she lives. She said the tabulation process throws out ballots, is too complicated and increases the chance of less-popular candidates to gain office.

Maine adopted ranked-choice voting in 2018, but several Republican-led states have soured on the idea after Alaska elected its first Democrat in decades in its first ranked-choice election.

Ranked-choice voting advocates argued that the practice could improve the voting process and that several of the proponents’ ideas aren’t backed up by evidence. About 75% of Utah voters who participated in a ranked-choice voting pilot found it easy, though neither ranked-choice or single-vote plurality voting reached majority support.

Resolution would say noncitizens can’t vote in Kansas

A House resolution proposed slightly altering the Kansas Constitution to more explicitly state that noncitizens aren’t allowed to vote, though Kansas’s laws have interpreted the current language as doing just that for over 100 years.

Some municipalities across the country have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, though they’re barred from participating in federal elections. No city in Kansas has followed suit.

The bill was supported by two out-of-state advocacy organizations, Americans for Citizen Voting and Opportunity Solutions Project. The ACLU, Loud Light and League of Women Voters opposed it.

Currently, Kansas enfranchises “every citizen of the United States who has attained the age of 18 years and who resides in the voting area in which he or she seeks to vote.” Proponents of the bill argue that it still leaves some wiggle room for municipalities to allow noncitizen voting.

“It does not prohibit a municipality from allowing a non-citizen to vote legally. It is granting the right to vote to citizens of the United States but not reserving the right to vote to only citizens of the United States,” Becky Arps, director of research for Americans for Citizen Voting, wrote to the House Elections Committee.

About 15 states have language explicitly barring noncitizens from voting. Arps said some states with similar language to Kansas’s statutes have cities that allow noncitizen voting. But Arps couldn’t point to any currently existing city in Kansas that allows noncitizen voting.

“I am unaware of any situations where noncitizens are voting,” Arps said. “You are at risk for a municipality that maybe even considers themselves a sanctuary city, I don’t know if you have any of those or that consider themselves that, they would be a municipality that might decide to allow noncitizens to vote.”

The committee hearing turned contentious when Hammet, president of Loud Light, could give people the impression that illegal immigrants are voting in elections and increase incendiary rhetoric surrounding immigration. He referred to the Garden City bombing plot in 2016 as an example of violence targeted at immigrants.

“In their legal defense, they tried to say that they thought it was OK because of the political rhetoric about immigrants. And I know that’s no one’s intention here, to be clear, but I just want you to think about this. Legally and practically, it won’t do anything, but it could create fuel on the fire for some radical groups,” Hammet said.

Lawmakers grilled Hammet, who is frequently an oppositional voice in committee hearings, for invoking political violence and his use of the term xenophobic.

“It’s a little distasteful that we got into this,” said Rep. Ricky James, R-La Cygne.

If it passes, the resolution would require approval by voters in a statewide election.

Bill would require comparison of voter rolls to temporary drivers’ licenses

House Bill 2020 was the least controversial of the election bills that got a committee hearing this week, with even opponent testimony saying it agreed with the concept of the bill but had concerns about how it would work in practice. The bill would require the Division of Motor Vehicles to provide a list of all temporary drivers’ licenses issued to noncitizens to the secretary of state, who would compare the list with voter registration rolls and delete any noncitizens on the rolls.

General counsel for the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office said the process is similar to what the office has been doing on its own.

“Essentially what this bill does is it makes a statutory requirement of something that’s been going on for about 15 years, and we recently worked with Gov. Kelly on this where the Department of Motor Vehicles would give us a list of people that have a temporary driver’s license, and we would compare it to the voter rolls, trying to identify anyone that might be a noncitizen,” Clay Barker said.

Loud Light and the ACLU submitted testimony in opposition to the bill, but Hammet said the system should required investigation and due diligence before removing people from voter rolls.

“The most dangerous thing you could do is assume that you can take two lists and perfectly compare them,” Hammet said.