Kansas lawmakers could transform elections with a series of bills that squeeze advanced voting timelines, stamp out rare instances of noncitizen voting and tinker with some candidate filing and advocacy rules.
One bill sought to eradicate elections exclusively conducted by mail.
Many of the changes largely were driven by the House Elections Committee chair, Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican who is running for secretary of state, and co-chair, Rep. Paul Waggoner, a Hutchinson Republican.
During debate this week, the duo propped up bills that would require driver's licenses to indicate citizenship status, shrink the voter registration and advanced voting windows ahead of elections, and prohibit government employees from using public assets to advocate for or against constitutional amendments and ballot questions.
Twenty Republicans sponsored House Bill 2503, which would repeal the state's Mail Ballot Election Act, removing the possibility for local entities to carry out elections solely with mail-in ballots. It passed the House on Thursday in a 72-50 vote.
Another bill would require the names, addresses and other personal identification information of people without U.S. citizenship who receive public benefits to be regularly shared with the Kansas Secretary of State's Office under Proctor's House Bill 2491.
The National Voter Registration Act created an automatic voter registration option for people obtaining driver's licenses, signing up for Medicaid or qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Proctor said the law has turned Kansas into "a welfare voter state."
The bill mirrors one passed last year that now requires the Kansas Department of Revenue, which oversees driver's license administration, to send personal data to the Secretary of State's Office, where it is compared side-by-side with statewide voter rolls.
"Every time we have one of these bills, we hear the same thing," Proctor said. "We used to hear, 'This never happens. Noncitizens never vote.' "
Now, he said, he hears that voting among people without U.S. citizenship "seldom happens. It's infrequent." It's a shift he attributed to two voter fraud-related indictments in Kansas. Clay Barker, general counsel to the Secretary of State's Office, confirmed at a Jan. 29 committee hearing that two people have been indicted for fraudulent voting-related crimes, a third indictment is on the way and 10 people are being examined.
"One is too many," Proctor said, because he believes every vote cast by someone without U.S. citizenship cancels out a citizen's valid vote.
No 'vast conspiracy'
It has been explicitly illegal for immigrants to vote in federal elections since 1996, and no state allows people to vote in statewide elections if they are not citizens. Election offices monitor for fraudulent votes, and people can face stiff penalties and potential deportation if they cast ballots illegally.
Voting rights advocates have maintained that illegal voting is extremely rare and often the result of administrative error.
"Am I up here saying that there's a vast conspiracy to let noncitizens vote?" Proctor said. "No."
He said he believes people without citizenship end up on voter rolls unintentionally.
"But we owe it to Kansans to be able to tell them with confidence, 'No, noncitizens are not voting, and we know because we have all these different ways of scrubbing the voter rolls to make sure they never get on the voter rolls in the first place,' " he said.
No evidence suggests that instances of noncitizen voting affects the outcomes of elections in the U.S., according to an analysis from the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank founded by four former U.S. Senate majority leaders, including the late U.S. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas.
The analysis examined the Heritage Foundation's Election Fraud Cases database, which found 77 instances of people without citizenship voting between 1999 and 2023, and a Brennan Center for Justice study that inspected 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election across 42 jurisdictions, which found approximately 30 instances of people without citizenship voting.
HB 2491 passed the House on Wednesday in an 87-37 vote, with Republican Reps. Mark Schreiber of Emporia and Lauren Bohi of Olathe joining Democrats in voting against the bill and Democratic Rep. Wanda Brownlee Paige of Kansas City voting with Republicans in favor.
Rep. Kirk Haskins, a Topeka Democrat and the ranking minority member on the House Elections Committee, spurned the bill, pointing out it had three proponents and 12 opponents at a committee hearing. He highlighted the rare instances of votes cast by people without citizenship.
"I don't know why we keep emphasizing we have an issue when it's been proven we don't time and time again," he said.
House Bill 2448, a Proctor-sponsored measure that would require citizenship status to appear on driver's licenses, passed the House on Feb. 12 in a 77-41 vote.
People without citizenship can obtain a temporary driver's license, but providing documented proof of citizenship is not currently a prerequisite to getting a driver's license.
A previous Kansas law, backed by then-Secretary of State and current Attorney General Kris Kobach, that required proof of citizenship to vote was struck down in court. The litigation revealed the law prevented more than 30,000 Kansans from voting and raised concerns of violating civil rights during the three years it was in effect. Kansans are still required to show photo ID upon voting.
'Unfunded mandate'
As the Legislature barrels toward self-imposed deadlines to move bills from chamber to chamber and then on to committees, the House passed the elections-related legislation this week at a rapid clip.
House Bill 2453 would modify three components of advanced voting. It would shift the mail-in ballot deadline by a week, moving it from the Tuesday preceding Election Day to two weeks before Election Day, and clerks would have to send ballots 22 days before an election.
It also would shrink the deadline for in-person advance voting, requiring ballots be submitted by the Friday before Election Day instead of noon the day before, as is the current practice. The bill gives county clerks the option to extend the deadline to noon on the Sunday preceding election day, but it could be costly to staff election offices on the weekend, when government buildings are typically closed.
The bill also would forbid county election officers from accepting voter registrations after the 25th day before an election, and it would eliminate the procedures for canvassing and challenging advance mail-in ballots after polls close on Election Day.
It was sponsored by Rep. Sandy Pickert, a Wichita Republican, but Proctor advocated in favor of it on the House floor Tuesday. Pickert was the only person to speak in support of the bill during its hearing in early February.
While the Secretary of State's Office said it could use existing resources to update training information for local elections officials, the Kansas Association of Counties indicated HB 2453 would increase costs for counties to hire additional staff.
Haskins criticized the bill's supporters on Tuesday for prioritizing legislation that could potentially drain county revenue at a time when voters are increasingly frustrated with high property taxes — often the main source of counties' operating budgets.
"But yet, we're not going to give them any money. We're not going to reduce property tax," he said. "We're not going to address the fact that county election offices, they don't even know how much it's going to cost. But we do need more people. This is called by definition an unfunded mandate."
The House passed the bill in a 86-38 vote on Wednesday, and Republicans Schreiber and Rep. Samantha Poetter Parshall of Paola joined Democrats in voting against it.
House Bill 2733 would require elected officials who hold statewide and local offices to be residents of the state of Kansas and the districts they represent upon election and throughout the duration of their terms. The bill from Rep. Bill Sutton, a Gardner Republican, passed the House on Tuesday without opposition.
Legislators are already required under state law to be voters in the district they represent and a resident of Kansas, with their primary residence located in their district, so they were not included in the bill's proposed changes.
House Bill 2451, sponsored by Waggoner, would bar government employees from advocating for or against proposed constitutional amendments or ballot questions. The House voted on Wednesday to pass the bill in an 88-36 vote with Schreiber joining Democrats voting against it and Democrats Brownlee Paige and Rep. Angela Martinez of Wichita voting in favor with Republicans.
This story was originally published by the Kansas Reflector.
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