TOPEKA — In the race to become the state’s top elections officer, Kansas voters can pick from a Democrat who spent five months in the Legislature five years ago, a former Republican who is trying to establish an alternative party, and a Republican legislator whose campaign focuses on the fear of noncitizens voting.
The three are running to replace Secretary of State Scott Schwab, who pursued the GOP nomination for governor rather than seek a third term.
There’s Jennifer Day, a Johnson County Democrat, and Scott Morgan, director of the United Kansas party, who both said in interviews that Kansas elections are secure and that a constitutional amendment requiring voters be citizens is redundant because the requirement is already in the constitution.
And there’s Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican who tilts against an imaginary and undefined “axis of ballot harvesting,” led the charge to put the constitutional amendment on the November ballot, and refuses to engage with Kansas Reflector reporters when questioned at campaign events or contacted by phone or email.
“There’s not a chance in hell I’m answering questions for your paper,” he said when approached at a September forum in Salina.
Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector
Day’s background
Day said she came to Kansas to visit family, fell in love and decided to stay.
She has lived here for 30 years. She said she worked as an executive assistant before opening her own business in 2013 for real estate investment and interior design.
In 2020, she won election to the Kansa House by 62 votes. She then left the seat after her first legislative session when she moved out of the district.
She said she was motivated to run for secretary of state because of concerns about Proctor’s initiatives as chair of the House Elections Committee to restrict voting rights — some of which have landed the state in court. The Secretary of State’s Office should be “quiet and boring,” she said.
“The majority of Kansans really appreciate leaders that are not looking to make headlines and are really just wanting to do the job,” she said.
She said her “hands-on experience” of working elections will help her connect with county clerks across the state.
“I think it’s important that we elect someone to this position who has that disposition that is able to listen and connect well with legislators, voters, our elected officials across the state, and to collaborate in a way that is going to be impactful and not lead to litigation for the state in Kansas,” she said.
Photo by Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector
Morgan’s background
Morgan is a fifth-generation Kansan who worked for U.S. Sens. Nancy Kassebaum and Bob Dole, and was Dole’s chief counsel when he ran for president in 1988. He also served as chief counsel for Gov. Mike Hayden.
In 1990, he was the GOP nominee for the 2nd District congressional seat, losing to Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Slattery with 37% of the vote. He also challenged then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach in the 2014 GOP primary and received 35% of the vote. As his campaign website says: “Sure, he lost that one too. He is consistent.”
He managed to win two terms on the Lawrence school board along the way.
In recent years, Morgan said, he has been working to find a political home for those who aren’t being served by either of the major parties. He hopes to win enough of the vote to gain recognition for the fledgling United Kansas party.
“It’s just providing a choice is all it really is,” Morgan said. “We are an alternative. We’re trying to be the center-left and center-right, forming a coalition, instead of with the extremes.”
He said there is a “genuine hunger” among voters for “something different.”
As for the complaint typically lobbed at third-party candidates: “I’ve grown very wary of the whole ‘you’re a spoiler’ thing,” Morgan said. “I get that from hardcore Democrats a lot, and I think they really misunderstand the math in this thing. It’s not fair, because you’re not a spoiler. You’re a choice.”
He said a lot of the people who vote for him either would not have cast ballots for the office or picked the Republican, based on his background.
Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector
Constitutional amendment
Proctor said during a recent Statehouse news conference, to which Kansas Reflector was not invited, that when people vote, they exercise the “political power that used to be exercised by a gun.”
“We’re all endowed by our creator — not government, by our creator — with the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said. “But we’re all so darn different, and that’s why it’s never worked before. That’s why no nation has ever been able to organize under principles.”
He continued: “Our founders found the secret sauce. They created the social contract that we still adhere to today that says, ‘Hey, every couple years we’re going to get together and we’re going to pick our leaders.’ Before 1776, the way people picked leaders is they picked up guns and they shot the other side until one side won and that person was in charge. The founders rediscovered the idea of the ballot box.”
The U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, and governments since at least ancient Greece have conducted elections.
“If we throw open the gates and let anybody exercise that political power, whether they have sworn to those principles or not, we’re not going to have a country anymore,” Proctor said. “We’re going to fly apart.”
Proctor said he started hearing concerns about noncitizen voting a couple of years ago and decided to look into the matter.
“You could have knocked me over when I found out that nowhere in our Kansas Constitution does it actually say you must be a citizen to vote,” Proctor said. “The way our constitution is written, it says ‘every citizen can vote,’ which is not ‘only citizens can vote.’ And so I thought, hey, that’s low-hanging fruit. We can fix that right now.”
Here’s what the state constitution currently says: “Every citizen of the United States who has attained the age of eighteen years and who resides in the voting area in which he or she seeks to vote shall be deemed a qualified elector.”
Here’s the proposed change on the November ballot: “No person shall be deemed a qualified elector unless such person: (1) Is a citizen of the United States; (2) has attained the age of eighteen years; and who (3) except as provided in subsection (b) or (c), resides in the voting area in which he or she such person seeks to vote.”
Amii Castle, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Kansas, wrote in a column for Kansas Reflector that the constitutional already requires voters to be citizens. She also warned that the proposed amendment could give Republicans a basis to reopen the legal fight over a state law that required people to produce a birth certificate or otherwise prove their citizenship before they could register to vote.
Federal courts determined the law was unconstitutional following a years-long legal battle. Kobach failed to prove his bogus claims about widespread voter fraud or show how the proof of citizenship requirement would solve a hypothetical problem. By requiring people to produce a birth certificate, the law blocked more than 35,000 eligible voters from registering.
Proctor pointed to the federal ruling as he complained about Castle’s column during his news conference.
“Nothing that we can do in the Kansas Constitution will, in any way, allow us to implement documentary proof of citizenship,” Proctor said.
He dismissed the argument that illegal voting is extraordinarily rare. He pointed to the conviction this year of the Republican mayor of Coldwater, who had a green card but wasn’t a citizen, as proof that immigrants sometimes vote. He said Kobach, now the attorney general, is prosecuting three additional noncitizens for voting.
“People will say, ‘Well, golly, it’s only four.’ I would just ask, ‘How many is too many?’ I would contend that one is too many because every time a noncitizen votes, they are canceling out the vote of a valid Kansas voter,” Proctor said.
Morgan said he was unimpressed with Proctor’s argument for the amendment.
“We know that thousands of actual citizens were denied the right to vote because they didn’t have the right paperwork, and all of that was to protect against a supposed threat of noncitizens voting, of which there are a minuscule amount,” Morgan said.
Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector
Election security
Morgan scoffed at Republicans who complain about election security, as many have since Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square.
In Kansas, Morgan pointed out, Republicans have won every election but one — in 1948, for a two-year term — for secretary of state since 1898.
He said the office needs to provide technical advice to county officials, especially smaller ones that don’t have the budget. He said the state could improve its election audits, and add risk assessment audits. The biggest vulnerability, he said, would be the list of registered voters, known as the “voter roll.”
“It’s just a gaping back door to the whole thing, and that is what really needs to be strengthened and can be strengthened,” Morgan said. “That is a solvable problem. It just requires will. But everybody’s worried about security, so I assume they’re willing to put a little bit of money toward that. Otherwise, you’re really just blowing hot wind.”
He said “ballot harvesting” — Proctor’s term for volunteers who deliver mail-in ballots — isn’t a real problem.
“It sounds scary,” he said, but it is really Kansans “just trying to help” their older friends and neighbors.
Day said she has heard concerns that people could somehow print ballots, randomly fill them out and turn them in.
“As I explained to my neighbor, you would have to know their driver’s license number. You would have to know how they sign their name,” she said.
“Harvesting — quote unquote — it just is not a thing,” she added.
Others have suggested, without evidence, that people who collect ballots on behalf of voters could throw them away instead of delivering them to the election office.
Proctor supported legislation that limited the number of ballots an individual could turn in to 10, and he proposed further restrictions earlier this year.
“There’s always these conspiracies, but I’ve just never seen them,” Morgan said. “Conspiracies are a lousy thing to make public policy on.”
This story previously appeared on the Kansas Reflector.
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