Global Courant 2023-05-06 04:32:44
Kansas has lost a legal battle over one of the voting laws passed by the Republican-led legislature in the wake of the 2020 election.
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil ruled Thursday that it is unconstitutional to make it a crime for groups to include a voter’s name, address and other information on advance ballot applications.
Two national nonprofits, VoteAmerica and the Voter Participation Center, were sued after two voting bills were passed in 2021 over Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto power. One of these included the restriction on pre-filling ballots, even if the voter provided the information and asked for a pre-ballot application.
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The groups, whose mission is to promote voting among traditionally disadvantaged groups, including young and minority voters, argued that there is a higher response rate when the group pre-populates the applications. Nearly 70,000 Kansas voters submitted a mail-in ballot request in the 2020 general election that was provided by the Voter Participation Center to their county election official, the lawsuit said.
But the state countered that the groups’ mailing efforts during the 2020 presidential election led to a deluge of duplicate applications. Election officials testified that the deluge of applications led to confusion, with many voters repeatedly requesting mail-in ballots.
A Kansas law banning the pre-filling of ballots in advance was ruled unconstitutional by a district judge on Thursday.
Vratil acknowledged in the ruling that some election officials likely felt “overburdened” as the pandemic sent mail-in votes soar. More than three times as many Kansans voted by mail in 2020 compared to 2018.
“Due to the highly contested nature of the election, in addition to the pandemic, many voters were concerned that their ballots would not be received and counted, and requested duplicate ballots for peace of mind,” Vratil said.
She said that in that environment, the rise in duplicate ballots could not be attributed solely to the pre-filled ballots that voting groups sent out to try and reject turnout.
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In fact, she wrote that pre-filling ballots could even be “more helpful than harmful to overburdened election officials” and found that the restriction infringed on the group’s First Amendment free speech rights.
Whitney Tempel, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Scott Schwab, said the office did not immediately have a comment.
Another law passed in 2021 is also being challenged in court. In March, the Kansas Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit brought by Loud Light, the League of Women Voters of Kansas, the Topeka Independent Living Resource Center and the Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
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They challenged the provisions of a law that limits the number of pre-ballots individuals can collect and requires election officials to match the signatures on a ballot with someone’s voter registration. A Shawnee County judge initially denied it after finding the restrictions were reasonable.
