A coalition of civic groups is challenging a new state law that repealed a three-day grace period for mail ballots to arrive at election offices after Election Day.
The three groups – Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, Loud Light and the Disability Rights Center of Kansas – say that repealing the grace period was unconstitutional and disenfranchised Kansas voters.
They said repealing the grace period would make it “virtually impossible for many voters” to cast a ballot by mail in an election.
They want the law repealing the grace period blocked.
They wanted election officials ordered to count all ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received within seven days after the election — “the time Kansas’s own election officials expect it will take a ballot to reach its office.”
The Republican-led Legislature voted last session to repeal the grace period over the veto of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. The governor’s veto was overridden 30-10 in the Senate and 84-41 in the House.
“Not only will removing the three-day grace period for mail ballots disenfranchise thousands of Kansas voters, but it also shows a lack of understanding of our elections in Kansas,” Kelly said when vetoing the bill.
Republican state Rep. Pat Proctor, a candidate for Kansas secretary of state in 2026 and chair of the House elections committee, accused the groups bringing the lawsuit of masking their financial supporters.
“The axis of ballot harvesting strikes again,” Proctor said, renewing a phrase that he coined when he announced his campaign for secretary of state.
“Loud Light, Appleseed and their allies hide behind their supposed nonpartisan, nonprofit status to rake in millions from George Soros and foreign billionaires that they use it to sue every common sense measure we pass to restore confidence in our elections,” Proctor said.
“The so-called ‘three-day grace period’ has disenfranchised thousands of rural voters since its passage in 2017. But they don’t care, as long as the ballots they harvest get counted.”
The lawsuit, filed in Douglas County District Court, argued that repealing the grace period infringes on voters’ rights to equal protection, due process and suffrage afforded by the Kansas Constitution.
The old law, enacted in 2017, allowed ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be accepted for three days after the election.
The lawsuit said the legislation eliminating the grace period will make successfully voting by mail “virtually impossible for many voters.”
“Even for those voters who request their ballots well in advance, if delays outside
their control arise at any stage of the process — and mail delays are only becoming more frequent — their ballot will be rejected, regardless of when it was sent,” the lawsuit said.
“Whether any particular Kansan’s vote counts will now likely depend on their geographic location and the arbitrary speed” with which the U.S. Postal Service delivers the ballot.
“The Kansas Constitution does not permit voters to be treated with such caprice,” the lawsuit said.
“Its equal protection clause prohibits the operation of a voting system that arbitrarily rejects voters’ ballots based on their geography and whether the post office did its job effectively,” the lawsuit said.
“Its due process clause requires that Kansas establish adequate procedures to ensure that voters have a reliable, fair, and effective method to cast their ballots,” the lawsuit said.
The threat of disenfranchising voters posed by abolishing the grace period is “particularly acute” for some of the state’s most vulnerable populations, the lawsuit said.
“The elderly and Kansans with disabilities often have little to no choice but to vote by mail.
“And rural voters and voters who are temporarily out-of-state, such as many college students, will also be disproportionately affected because their mail is less likely to be delivered in a timely manner…,” the lawsuit said.
Voting by mail is also particularly important to the elderly and to the thousands of
Kansans with disabilities, the lawsuit said.
“Kansas law recognizes this: Any voter who has a permanent disability or illness is eligible to receive permanent advance voting status, which means the voter is automatically mailed a ballot every election, without having to submit an application to do so.”
The problem is compounded because of the highly condensed period for voting by mail, the lawsuit said.
Unlike in most other states where mail ballots are sent to voters 30 or 45 days ahead of election day, Kansas does not permit election officials to mail advance ballots to voters until 20 days before Election Day, the lawsuit said.
“At the same time, the secretary of state’s office has previously recommended that at least 14 days be allowed for a ballot to travel to the voter and then back to the county election office, lest it arrive too late to be counted — and that was while the grace period was still in effect,” the lawsuit said.
Under the bill repealing the grace period, “this tightly compressed window for mail voting is among the most restrictive in the country.”
The lawsuit said that eliminating the grace period makes Kansas an outlier.
The lawsuit said that only one other state – Iowa, in this case – has an Election Day ballot receipt deadline and waits as long as Kansas does to send ballots to voters.
With the elimination of the three-day grace period, the lawsuit said Kansas’s 20-
day turn-around time for voting by mail is tied with Iowa as the shortest in the nation.
During the 2020 general election, the secretary of state’s office reported that more than 32,000 ballots arrived at county election offices during the three days after Election Day and were counted as a result.
Without the grace period, the lawsuit said those ballots would have been thrown out, and “those voters would have been disenfranchised.”
During the 2024 general election, which saw lower rates of advance mail voting as
compared to four years earlier, 2,110 ballots arrived in the three days after Election Day, each of which had been sent on or before Election Day.
“Without the grace period, however, those ballots would have been rejected, and the voters who cast those ballots would have been disenfranchised,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit accused lawmakers of ignoring “overwhelming evidence” that eliminating the grace period would disenfranchise Kansans.
The lawsuit noted that mail delivery service in Kansas had been eroding in recent years for a number of reasons, some of them unique to the state.
The lawsuit highlighted data from the U.S. Postal Service showing that in the first quarter
of 2023, 90% of first-class, two-day service standard mail in the Kansas-Missouri district was delivered on time. By the first quarter of 2025, that figure had dropped to 83%.
In the first quarter of 2023, the Postal Service delivered 78% of first-class, three-to-five-day service standard mail in the district on time. By the first quarter of 2025, that figure had declined to just 61%, according to the lawsuit.
“Instead of creating legislative solutions that would help fix the problem, however, the Legislature voted to make the problem much worse,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit pointed to the introduction of a bill eliminating the grace period.
The lawsuit zeroed in on comments from Rep. Proctor, chair of the House Elections Committee and sponsor of the bill.
The lawsuit said that Proctor initially argued that rural voters were disenfranchised by the grace period because their ballots arrived without postmarks, saying that justified eliminating the grace period.
“Of course, this argument is non-sensical — eliminating the grace period would only
exacerbate the problem by disenfranchising even more Kansans, particularly rural voters, whose ballots disproportionately arrive after election day.”
The lawsuit also pointed to videos of Proctor saying he wanted to “chip away” at advance voting.
“As Rep. Proctor admitted in a leaked video, ‘If it was up to me, Election Day would be Election Day. There wouldn’t be early voting. Mail-in ballots would only be for military or severely disabled.”
After a video of those comments was released in February, Proctor responded with a statement.
“For the sake of improving voter confidence, I would prefer that everyone voted on Election Day and that only military/overseas and disabled voter used mail-in ballots, though, as I say in the video, I realize that, realistically, early and mail-in voting are here to stay,” he said in the statement.
As evidence that he had no intention to end either early or mail-in voting, Proctor pointed to a compromise proposal from 2024 in which he offered adding more days for early and mail-in voting in exchange for eliminating the three-day grace period.
Senate President Ty Masterson said he wasn’t surprised by the lawsuit.
He alluded to a federal appeals court ruling against a Mississippi law that allowed absentee ballots postmarked on or before the date of the election to be accepted no more than five business days after the election.
It was very similar to a Kansas law, which allowed ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be accepted for three days after the election.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Mississippi law was preempted by federal law.
The court cited two constitutional provisions, including one allowing legislatures to set the time, manner and place of elections, but allowing Congress to alter those rules for federal elections.
“The usual left-wing groups suing to keep counting votes well after the polls close is no surprise,” Masterson said in a statement.
“The fact is a federal court already ruled that extended grace periods are unconstitutional and this law is consistent with the ruling.”
“It is simply common sense that ballots need to be turned in by 7:00 p.m. on Election Day.”
