Kansas lawmakers pushed a slate of election integrity measures through the House this week, targeting everything from all-mail elections to noncitizen voter roll scrubbing to advanced voting timelines. The bills, driven largely by House Elections Committee chair Rep. Pat Proctor, a Leavenworth Republican running for secretary of state, passed with comfortable margins and now head to the Senate.
Six bills cleared the chamber. The most consequential would repeal the state's Mail Ballot Election Act, require public benefits agencies to share data on non-citizens with election officials, put citizenship status on driver's licenses, and tighten deadlines for mail-in and in-person advance voting. One passed without any opposition at all.
Democrats called it a solution in search of a problem. The vote tallies suggest Kansas Republicans disagree.
The centerpiece of the push is a set of interlocking measures designed to keep noncitizens off voter rolls in the first place. House Bill 2491, which passed 87-37 on Wednesday, would require that names, addresses, and other personal identification information of people without U.S. citizenship who receive public benefits be regularly shared with the Kansas Secretary of State's Office, according to the Kansas Reflector.
That builds on a bill passed last year requiring the Kansas Department of Revenue to send personal data to the Secretary of State's Office, where it is compared side-by-side with statewide voter rolls. House Bill 2448, which passed 77-41 on Feb. 12, would add citizenship status to driver's licenses, giving election officials another verification layer.
Proctor framed the effort not as conspiracy-chasing but as basic institutional hygiene. He acknowledged on the House floor that noncitizen voting is not rampant, then made the case that even rare occurrences demand systematic prevention:
"But we owe it to Kansans to be able to tell them with confidence, 'No, noncitizens are not voting, and we know because we have all these different ways of scrubbing the voter rolls to make sure they never get on the voter rolls in the first place.'"
The facts back up the concern enough to justify action. Clay Barker, general counsel to the Secretary of State's Office, confirmed at a Jan. 29 committee hearing that two people have been indicted for fraudulent voting-related crimes, a third indictment is on the way, and 10 people are being examined. It has been explicitly illegal for immigrants to vote in federal elections since 1996. The Heritage Foundation's database catalogues 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023.
Proctor put it plainly:
"One is too many."
That's a hard line to argue with. Either you believe election integrity matters at every margin, or you believe some amount of illegal voting is an acceptable cost of convenience. Kansas Republicans chose the former.
Democrats marshaled the predictable counterarguments. Rep. Kirk Haskins, a Topeka Democrat and ranking minority member on the House Elections Committee, led the opposition. His critique leaned less on principle and more on logistics and cost:
"We're not going to address the fact that county election offices, they don't even know how much it's going to cost. But we do need more people. This is called by definition an unfunded mandate."
Haskins also pointed to the committee hearing for HB 2491, where three proponents and 12 opponents testified. He questioned why the legislature keeps "emphasizing we have an issue when it's been proven we don't time and time again."
Proctor anticipated this. He noted the familiar pattern of shifting goalposts from opponents of election integrity reform:
"We used to hear, 'This never happens. Noncitizens never vote.'"
Now the line has moved to "seldom happens" and "it's infrequent." The concession embedded in the retreat is the whole point. If it happens at all, the system failed. The question is whether you build safeguards or shrug.
As for the unfunded mandate argument: county clerks manage elections with public money to serve the public interest. Verifying that only eligible citizens vote is not an add-on to that mission. It is the mission.
House Bill 2503, which passed 72-50 on Thursday, would repeal the Mail Ballot Election Act entirely, removing the possibility for local entities to carry out elections solely with mail-in ballots. This does not eliminate mail voting. It eliminates the option for jurisdictions to make mail the only way to vote.
The distinction matters. Conservatives have long argued that all-mail elections reduce the security and oversight that in-person voting provides. Repealing the act preserves mail as an option while ensuring voters always have access to a physical polling place.
House Bill 2453, passed 86-38 on Wednesday, restructures the advanced voting calendar:
Rep. Sandy Pickert, a Wichita Republican who sponsored HB 2453, was the only person to speak in support of the bill during its hearing in early February. The bill passed anyway, by 48 votes.
The logic here is straightforward. Tighter deadlines give election officials more time to verify ballots and less exposure to the logistical chaos that plagued elections in recent cycles. Earlier cutoffs also mean results come faster and with fewer outstanding ballots lingering in the count. Voters who care enough to participate can plan 25 days.
House Bill 2451, passed 88-36 on Wednesday, would bar government employees from advocating for or against proposed constitutional amendments or ballot questions. The bill drew bipartisan support, with Democratic Reps. Wanda Brownlee Paige of Kansas City and Angela Martinez of Wichita are joining Republicans.
This is a clean, good-government measure. Taxpayer-funded employees using their positions to influence ballot outcomes is a conflict of interest regardless of which side they advocate for. The public pays them to administer policy, not to campaign for it.
House Bill 2733, introduced by Rep. Bill Sutton, a Gardner Republican, passed the House on Tuesday without opposition. It requires certain elected officials to be residents of Kansas and their districts upon election and throughout their terms. That a residency requirement for elected officials needed to be codified at all tells you something about the state of modern politics.
Kansas has been here before. A previous law backed by Kris Kobach, then-Secretary of State and current Attorney General, required proof of citizenship to vote. It was struck down in court after preventing more than 30,000 Kansans from voting during the three years it was in effect.
That history looms over the current push. The new approach is notably different. Rather than imposing proof-of-citizenship requirements directly on voters at the point of registration, these bills work on the back end: cross-referencing public benefits data, flagging noncitizens through driver's license records, and giving the Secretary of State's Office tools to audit rolls proactively. It's a system designed to catch problems without creating a barrier that a court can paint as disenfranchisement.
Whether courts see it that way remains to be seen. But the legislative architecture is smarter this time, built to survive legal challenge by focusing on data-sharing between agencies rather than demanding documents from individual voters.
The bills now move to the Kansas Senate. Proctor, who is running for secretary of state, has made election integrity the signature issue of both his legislative work and his campaign. The margins in the House suggest the appetite for these reforms extends well beyond one ambitious lawmaker.
Kansas voters will eventually judge whether their elections are cleaner for it. The lawmakers who voted yes this week are betting they will.
