
Kansas Fights Voter Suppression: A Legacy Worth Preserving
During the 2024 legislative session, the House Committee on Elections saw 47 bills introduced, with more than half geared toward making voting more difficult. You can compare that to the 2019-2020 legislative session; that same committee heard 15 election-related bills, and most of those were only related to campaign finance issues. Over the past five years, both in policy and rhetoric, Kansas has seen an increase in barriers to voting, restricting voting even more than initial attempts to do so over a decade ago. Despite the many organizations and leaders in our state fighting for voting rights, voter suppression continues to be a tough battle.
Voter suppression is defined as “any legal or extralegal measure or strategy whose purpose or practical effect is to reduce voting, or registering to vote, by members of a targeted racial group, political party, or religious community.”
Earlier this year, Kansas saw a big win against voter suppression when District Judge Teresa Watson approved a temporary injunction halting the enforcement of a 2021 state law that could have criminalized voter registration activities. This injunction allows Kansans to conduct get-out-the-vote work and register voters without fear of criminal charges.
It hasn’t always been this way. When Kansas was in its early statehood, we averaged ahead of the curve in voting rights. Kansas gave women the right to vote eight years before the 19th Amendment was adopted in the US Constitution, and in 1864, Kansas adopted voting by mail-in ballot to allow soldiers to vote in the election. From 1861 until 1918, Kansas allowed voting from non-US citizens as long as they “declared their intention to become citizens.” While the measure was rejected, in 1867, Kansas voted to remove the terms “white” and “male” from voting laws.
But, as elections became more politicized across the country, Kansas politicians succeeded in suppressing voter turnout under the guise of keeping elections “safe.” In 2011, the Safe and Fair Elections Act was signed into law. This law went into effect in 2012 and required all voters to show photo identification to vote. Voter identification laws are touted as a way to decrease vote fraud, although there has been little evidence that widespread voter fraud exists in the United States. However, what requiring photo identification does is add another barrier to the voting process. When you think about the time, resources, and potential challenges that it takes to obtain a photo ID, it is clear that this is a barrier that disproportionately affects marginalized groups.
In 2013, Kansas began requiring people to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. This proof could be a birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers. In 2018, this law was determined unconstitutional and overturned. A lawsuit against this law alleges that the law blocked over 35,000 Kansans from registering to vote in those five years.
Laws and policies aren’t the only ways we see voter suppression manifest. At Kansas Appleseed, we know that voting and participating in the voting process are important and essential to policy change. But we also know that life can be hard, and it’s even harder if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. And if someone is trying to figure out how they will feed themselves or their family or choosing between buying medication or keeping the lights on, voting might be the last thing they will make time for. Disenfranchisement doesn’t happen through policy alone. It happens when people are struggling to afford groceries, and it happens when young people are told they are lazy and don’t care, and it happens when election promises are consistently empty.
This is all intentional. People in power want young people to be disillusioned, and they want those in poverty not to have the time and capacity to vote. People in power understand the value of the negative feedback loop. If folks can’t or won’t vote due to being disillusioned or not having the time to vote due to their fight to survive, then nothing ever changes, and power structures remain the same.
We can look at our state’s history and continue its legacy of ensuring every Kansan can vote. It all starts with us, and it starts in communities. Make a plan to vote, and make sure your friends, family members, your local coffee shop workers, and the person behind you in line at the store all have plans to vote. All counties in the state have begun early voting. You can check your county’s early voting locations here, and you can view your sample ballot and find your polling location by going here.
If you would like more information on the voting process and your rights as a voter, we have created one pagers delving into those topics that you can view by clicking their hyperlinks.
Voting is a vital tool in making our communities stronger and healthier. So let us reach those stars despite all the difficulties.
See you out there.
Resources:
- Duignan, Brian. “voter suppression”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Oct. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/voter-suppression. Accessed 29 October 2024.
- Bonney, Stephen. DEMOCRACY’S RAINBOW: THE LONG ASCENT and RAPID DESCENT of VOTING RIGHTS in KANSAS. Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy. 2016. https://lawjournal.ku.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/V25I3A4.pdf
- Fish, Steven, et al. IN the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT for the DISTRICT of KANSAS. 2016. https://ksd.uscourts.gov/sites/ksd/files/16-2105-doc-1-complaint.pdf