The Legislature has approved a package of bills aimed at making voting more accessible and ensuring that as many votes are counted as possible.
The Senate on Thursday sent the governor a bill that, among other things, would allow voters in a county to cast a ballot at any polling place on Election Day.
The bill gives county election officials the ability to decide whether to make that convenience available to voters.
No county would be required to make the option available to voters. They also need the technology to offer voting anywhere throughout the county on Election Day.
Also approved was a measure that would require county election officers to attempt to contact each voter who casts an advance ballot without a signature or one with a signature that doesn’t match what’s kept on file at the election office.
The bill requires election officials to give voters a chance to correct the problem before the final county canvass.
The Senate approved the bill 38-1. The House passed the legislation Wednesday 119-3.
“This bundled bill, I think, is one we can all take great pride in, providing greater access and maintenance of the ability to participate in our elections,” Democratic state Sen. David Haley told the Senate.
The measure relating to signatures stems from votes that were thrown out during last year’s elections because of signatures that were missing or didn’t match what was kept on file.
The signatures emerged as an issue in the tight race between Republicans Kris Kobach and Jeff Colyer in last year’s GOP primary for governor.
Four hundred and sixty ballots, including 80 in the primary, were not counted in Sedgwick County last year because of missing signatures.
In Johnson County, officials rejected 153 advanced-mail ballots during the primary because the signature on the envelope didn’t match the signature on file at the election office.
The American Civil Liberties Union testified that the national average for ballots being tossed because of a signature mismatch was 27.5 percent in 2016. In Kansas, it was 11.3 percent.
The ACLU highlighted the number of ballots thrown out in Johnson County in making the case for a change in the law.
“This may seem like a small number of voters, but some primaries in the state of Kansas were decided by single digit differences,” ACLU Policy Director Letitia Harmon told lawmakers earlier this session. “Beyond that, every vote that can count, should count.”
Sedgwick County sought the legislation allowing voters to cast a ballot at any polling place in the county.
Election officials there said they were seeing repeated instances of voters casting ballots at locations other than where they were designated to vote.
In the last two federal general elections, Sedgwick County election officials reported that between 1,140 and 1,700 provisional ballots were cast due to incorrect polling location.
That worries election officials because when a voter casts a provisional ballot, it doesn’t include the correct offices for their districts, resulting in only part of the ballot being counted.
“We want to do what we can to provide the voter with the correct races on their entire ballot,” Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman told lawmakers in testimony.
“We have had multiple close races in Sedgwick County and regularly have to draw a name out of a hat when there is a tied race,” she said.
