Our vote is (once again) under attack in Kansas

The Kansas Legislature reached the end of its regular session, allowing a break before coming back for the annual veto session in May. With this milestone reached, there’s time to take stock of how our elected officials responded to one of the session’s hot button issues: voting rights.

Our vote is one way to make our voices heard and impact change. In Kansas, it’s under attack.

Toward the end of the regular legislative session, many “election reform” measures started crashing into committee meetings with little to no warning, giving barely any opportunity for public comment or reflection of these bills, which were primarily written and championed by out-of-state lobbyists. After the dust of the blitz of new bills began to settle, House Bill 2183 emerged as a “catch-all” for most of the more harmful voter suppression efforts. This bill would:

• Limit a person’s ability to assist voters, including people with disabilities and elderly Kansans, to turn in their ballots
• Strip the Secretary of State of the authority to extend election deadlines during an emergency
• Harshly criminalize falsely representing oneself as an election official
• Prohibit candidates from helping turn in advance ballots of anyone except their immediate family
• Stop counties from receiving donations to support nonpartisan election-related work

These proposed laws were rushed through only because of the “perception” of voter fraud. Despite all evidence to the contrary and Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab repeatedly verifying the lack of any voter fraud in the 2020 elections, the perception of voter fraud was the only reason many legislators gave to justify passing laws that will disenfranchise tens of thousands of the Kansans.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare. A “smoking gun” report found only sixteen examples in our state since 2005. None of these examples involved issues being targeted by this year’s proposed legislation. Until former Congressional Representative Steve Watkins entered diversion in 2021, there had not been a case of voter fraud in Kansas since 2017.

This all leads to some basic soul-searching questions: Are sixteen individual cases of voter fraud spread out over the last sixteen years worth disenfranchising what has been estimated to be over 32,000 eligible, legal voters in Kansas in 2020 alone? Is this all that it takes to strip 32,000 Kansans of their fundamental rights, when all available evidence points to the perception of widespread fraud being–at best–a myth?

Despite this, HB 2183 passed and has been sent to Governor Kelly to either sign into law or veto. Hopefully, the Governor will veto this voter suppression bill, and the members of the Kansas Legislature can use the time between the regular and veto sessions to understand the harm this bill would cause.