Kansas officials to begin culling incomplete voter forms

On Friday, the Kansas Secretary of State’s office is set to initiate a new policy that will toss out any Kansas voter registration that hasn’t been completed within 90 days. One of the attorneys representing the prospective voters is former Kansas House Minority Leader Rep. Paul Davis, last year’s unsuccessful Democratic nominee for governor. The suit also asks a federal court to overturn the Kansas requirement that voters supply documents proving their citizenship. The lawsuit also calls Kansas’ citizenship requirement “overly broad” and claims the rule infringes on the fundamental constitutional right to vote because it is not “narrowly tailored to any compelling state interest”.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach noted that first-time voters who move would have to restart the registration process anyway, and that isn’t a problem because all a potential voter has to do is take a photo of his or her birth certificate or passport with a smartphone and either text it or email it to election officials. The latest action would be the first purge of incomplete applications.

“We have to send a message that look, we encourage everybody to vote, but by all means follow the rules and now that we have the authority to go after those who break our rules and effectively disenfranchise their fellow citizens by canceling out their votes, we’re going to do something about it”, Kobach said. “The law does not allow for a purging of voters like what Secretary Kobach is plotting to accomplish”, Davis said in a written statement. According to voter registration records, Cromwell is an 18-year-old Lawrence resident who sought to register as an unaffiliated voter and Keener is a 21-year-old Democrat from Eudora.

More than 30,000 Kansas voter registrations have been put on hold because they don’t include the citizenship documents.

More than half of the incomplete registration forms were from applicants listing no political affiliation. Cromwell and Keener both registered to vote and now marked “in suspense”. In a separate ongoing lawsuit filed in 2013, ACLU of Kansas is challenging the state’s proof-of-citizenship voting registration requirement.