Contempt of voters: Kansas Legislature moves toward dialing back mail vote deadline | Opinion

After watching Day 2 of the Kansas Legislature’s joint hearing on elections, it’s hard to resist the temptation to poke fun at the crackpots the committee invited to spin debunked conspiracy theories about voting machines.

I won’t promise not to come back to that another time, but we have a more important issue to deal with right now.

The thing that struck me hardest about this hearing was the contempt the committee displayed toward hundreds of thousands of Kansans — there were 459,229 in the 2020 general election — who prefer to vote by mail.

Leaders of the Joint Special Committee on Elections made it clear they plan to take another stab at repealing a common-sense law allowing citizens to mail their ballots up to election day, with a three-day grace period for the Post Office to deliver those ballots to the election office.

Hardcore Republican partisans who control the Legislature have learned to hate that law, because more often than not, those last-minute mail ballots have tended to favor Democrats.

We had a demonstration of that in Sedgwick County in 2020, when they swung the County Commission election to Democratic challenger Sarah Lopez over the scandal-plagued Republican incumbent Michael O’Donnell. O’Donnell held a 567-vote lead on election night, but late-arriving ballots nibbled away at his lead and Lopez eked out a 264-vote victory.

The County Commission has since decided to cease sending mail-ballot applications to all registered voters, a thinly veiled attempt to discourage mail voting and maybe torpedo the re-election chances for Lopez, the only Democrat who holds a county elected office.

So back to the state’s hearing, where the committee trotted out former state Rep. Keith Esau, former chairman of the House Elections Committee, to admit his “mistake” in passing the grace period bill in 2017.

“We have people who do not like seeing the counts change radically after the election night,” Esau said. “Every day (after an election) in Johnson County, we’re seeing hundreds of ballots being added, and it just makes people nervous that somebody was stuffing a ballot someplace.”

You know what makes me nervous? When state officials try to throw away thousands of legitimate votes because counting them makes conspiracy theorists nervous.

And then there was a public scolding of voters who’ve done nothing wrong.

Without the grace period, “I imagine people would just change their behaviors,” said committee Vice Chairman Pat Proctor, R-Leavenworth. “If we told them (mail votes) had to be in on election night, they’d just get them in on election night.”

That line got a rousing round of applause from the tinfoil-hat section of the audience.

Esau also was also dismissive of voters who use the grace period to get their ballots delivered.

“I think most of the people who are mailing that late are not paying that much attention to what’s happening,” he said. “If you have a mail ballot, fill it in and and send it in right away and then you won’t have a problem.”

Then again, you just might.

In the O’Donnell example I mentioned above, it was only nine days before the election that the public learned that the district attorney had started an ouster investigation over O’Donnell’s involvement in a false smear campaign and cover-up targeting Brandon Whipple in the Wichita mayoral race. And it was a mere four days before the election when O’Donnell announced that if elected, he would resign and not serve a second term.

If we’d had an election day deadline on mail ballots then, it’s highly likely the selection of a county commissioner, representing more than 100,000 people, would have been left up to a tiny handful of Republican Party insiders.

At the state hearing, hands were wrung and pearls were clutched over “dozens” of ballots that went uncounted in recent years because they arrived after election day without postmarks in some unnamed rural county.

Failing to postmark a ballot is a violation of federal postal regulations. So you tell me why it makes sense to disenfranchise thousands of citizens statewide, rather than making the postmaster of Podunkville do their job properly.

One good thing that happened at the hearing was what didn’t happen.

We didn’t have to hear from one Tore Maras, a QAnon podcaster who was invited to testify but then was dropped after I reported that she’s a serial grifter who bilked fire victims and Christians.

Apart from that, I don’t have much hope for this committee, or the Legislature, when they take up their annual round of voter-suppression bills.

Last session, lawmakers passed a bill to eliminate the grace period but couldn’t muster enough votes to override a veto by Gov. Laura Kelly. The year before, it didn’t get out of committee, because Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state, opposed it.

Given his long track record of authoring and defending unconstitutional restrictions on voting, a really good rule of thumb is that if Kobach says you’re going too far, you are.

Coming Tuesday: Exposing the flaws in plans for our 2024 presidential primary