Gov. Laura Kelly’s administration is fighting a proposal requiring every state agency that provides public benefits to report any noncitizen beneficiaries to the secretary of state to learn whether there’s illegal voting.
A top official from the state health department warned that the proposed law would violate a federal statute and a regulation if it had to share information from the state’s Medicaid program.
The proposal would require state agencies to report the name and address of each noncitizen receiving benefits quarterly to the secretary of state. The secretary of state, who is running for governor, supports the bill.
“We will support any bill that gives us the legal ability to obtain reliable lists of either residents, deceased (voters), felons and (noncitizens), to compare to our voter rolls to screen them to see if there are individuals we can flag for follow-up to see if they should come off the voter rolls,” said Clay Barker, general counsel for Secretary of State Scott Schwab.
The secretary of state now gets a quarterly report from the motor vehicles division of the Department of Revenue showing permanent and temporary driver’s licenses issued to noncitizens under a law enacted last year.
Barker has said that list is now matched against the voter rolls to determine whether someone is illegally registered to vote.
“We have no interest in what agency these names came from, what program they applied for or participating in, what benefit they get or any other status,” he said.
“We just want a list of names to compare to our voter rolls,” he said.
However, Barker suggested amending the bill to broaden the data points that would be turned over to the secretary of state.
He suggested including the first name, middle name or initial, last name, residential address, date of birth, alien number, last four digits of the Social Security number, and driver’s license number, if available.
“That would help us then remove individuals from the voter rolls, whether they were on there intentionally, whether they were on there by their own mistake,” he said.
He said the additional data would allow for faster and more accurate matching.
Barker said he believes the bill is aligned with a federal judge’s decision from 2018 that invalidated a state law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.
“A large majority of the Kansas population – whether you believe it’s rightly or wrongly – believe that citizenship and the voting rolls are an issue and this would be an appropriate legislative response,” he said.
However, Christine Osterlund, deputy secretary of agency integration and state Medicaid director at the Kansas health department, issued a warning about the bill.
She cited a federal law and regulation that requires states to restrict using or disclosing information about applicants and beneficiaries to purposes directly connected with the administration of the state Medicaid plan.
“If KDHE Medicaid was directed to release the names of noncitizens to the secretary of state, we would be in violation of federal law and the code of regulations,” she said.
“That is why we oppose this bill,” she said.
The Department for Children and Families did not testify on the bill, but it has refused to release similar types of information to the federal government.
However, there is another bill in the Legislature that would require the state agency to turn that information over the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Republican state Rep. Dale Helwig of Columbus asked Osterlund whether the state could reach some kind of agreement with the federal government to share information from the Medicaid program.
He cited testimony from an outside group supporting the bill that indicated that Louisiana enacted a similar law in 2025 that required state agencies to make monthly reports to their secretary of state for maintaining voter rolls.
“I didn’t hear the original person that testified say specifically of whether Medicaid was sharing,” Osterlund told the legislator.
Osterlund said the outside group that testified referred to state agencies generally.
“I have not talked to Louisiana Medicaid to ask, are you sharing this information, how did you get permission to share it,” she said.
“It is very clear to us when we can share, for what purposes we can share and we don’t think that this bill fits within that,” she said.
“If in fact our interpretation is correct and we went ahead and shared, we would be at risk of losing our federal match because we’re out of compliance with the federal government.”
Republican state Rep. Pat Proctor, chair of the House Elections Committee, asked Osterlund about her agency sending voter registration forms to Kansans and whether noncitizens got them and whether they registered to vote.
“How many noncitizens got voter registrations and how would we make sure that they didn’t register to vote if we don’t get the data on everybody that was a noncitizen that you sent one of those forms to?” Proctor asked.
In late 2021, the governor announced an agreement with a coalition of civic groups to comply with federal voting rights law and keep the state out of court.
There were two agreements, one with the state health department and another with the Department for Children and Families.
The agreements reached with the American Civil Liberties and the civic engagement group Loud Light called for providing resources about how to register to vote to Kansans receiving public benefits.
As part of the agreement, Department for Children and Families as well as the Kansas Department of Health and Environment sent more than 277,000 voter registrations leading up to the November 2020 general election.
The state also agreed to include voter registration information and applications with benefits at agency offices and on the agencies’ websites and online application portals.
“If you don’t give the secretary of state’s office a list of all the noncitizens you sent a voter registration form because they get benefits from you, how are they supposed to make sure that none of those people get onto the voter rolls?” Proctor asked.
Osterlund said her agency as well as the secretary of state use the federal database called SAVE, short for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements.
The SAVE program verifies U.S citizenship, naturalized or derived U.S. citizenship, or immigration status by searching available federal databases, including those from the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, the Department of State and the Social Security Administration.
The secretary of state uses that database as part of a data-sharing arrangement with federal immigration authorities.
The secretary of state signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to run information for about 2 million Kansas voters through the federal SAVE database to match citizenship and immigration status as well as whether there’s anyone on the rolls who died.
“Wouldn’t it just be simpler to give them the list?” Proctor said.
She responded, “If we didn’t have the federal restrictions.”
