(Updated to reflect final action)
A proposal that would end the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots hit a snag in the Senate late Thursday night after passing the House earlier in the evening.
The House voted 73-48 to approve a bill that ends a 2017 law allowing ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be accepted for three days after the election.
The proposal, however, offsets the ending of the grace period by adding two more days of voting at the front end.
The bill also allows voters to start casting ballots 22 days before the election.
The bill also moves up the deadline for requesting an advanced ballot by a week. The deadline for requesting an advanced ballot is now the Wednesday before Election Day.
Those changes would not start until 2025.
However, when the bill reached the Senate later in the evening, it was sent back to a conference committee because of questions about whether registering to vote and actually voting could occur on the same day.
Republican state Sen. Caryn Tyson said that under the bill, it could be possible to register to vote and cast a ballot the same day early in the process.
Tyson asked the Senate to send it back to committee to address the matter. The Senate rejected the bill on a 20-19 vote and the bill was sent back to conference committee.
Meanwhile, the House vote was 11 short of being veto proof, an important consideration given that Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a similar bill last year that ended the grace period but didn’t add days on the front end like this bill.
Republican state Rep. Pat Proctor, chair of the House elections committee, said he was concerned that voters were being disenfranchised when their mail ballots were discounted because they arrived after Election Day without a postmark.
“We are disenfranchising hundreds, maybe thousands of rural voters,” Proctor told the House chamber Thursday evening.
“We are disenfranchising voters who did everything right,” Proctor said. “They requested their ballot correctly. They filled out their ballot correctly.
“They put it in the mail and got it to their election office by three days after Election Day, but we can’t count their ballot because the post office didn’t postmark the ballot.”
Democrats said the post office should not be used as an excuse for eliminating the three-day grace period.
“If someone chooses to utilize the post office, it’s not their fault that the post office is dilatory in delivering (ballots) and they should not be disenfranchised by taking away this grace period,” said state Rep. Vic Miller, the top Democrat in the House.
Democratic state Rep. Cindy Neighbor of Shawnee said Kansas voters shouldn’t be punished for the inadequacies of the postal service.
“Why should the voters of Kansas, or anywhere else, have to suffer because a department cannot do their job?” she said.
The bill also includes a provision that would end in-person advance voting on the Monday before Election Day.
The bill would bring an end to in-person advance voting at 7 p.m. on the Sunday before Election Day starting in 2025.
The current law ends voting at noon on the Monday before Election Day.
However, the bill requires county election offices to provide at least four hours for advance in-person voting on the Saturday preceding the election to make up for lost voting on Monday.
The bill would authorize a county election officer to allow in-person voting until noon on the Monday before an election for any person for good cause.
The bill would not eliminate Monday until 2025, although election officials would have to provide extra time for voting this year.
