By Anna Kaminski, Kansas Reflector
TOPEKA — Kansas is one of 16 states that have enacted restrictive voting laws this year, falling just short of records set in 2021, according to a roundup of such laws from a national think tank.
The 29 laws tighten voter access by removing people from voter rolls, modifying mail-in ballot policies, or requiring birth certificates or passports to vote, according to a reportreleased Oct. 21 by the Brennan Center.
“State governments in 2025 are nearly on pace to match the number of restrictive voting laws enacted in 2021, when states enacted more restrictive legislation than at any other point so far in the 14 years the Brennan Center has tracked state voting legislation,” the report said. “That year, driven in large part by lies about the 2020 election being stolen, state legislatures passed an unprecedented number of laws that limited access to voting.”
In 2021, 17 states passed 32 restrictive laws, according to the center’s count.
This year, lawmakers in at least 47 states considered an estimated 469 bills containing restrictive provisions during their legislative sessions, according to data collected up to Oct. 6. Twenty bills are still moving through legislatures, the report said.
Kansas legislators overrode the governor’s veto in March to pass a law that requires advance ballots to be returned by 7 p.m. on Election Day. They did the same in April, passing a law that forbids the use of federal funds for conducting elections unless approved by the Legislature. The center classified that law as election interference legislation.
Similar laws in Iowa, Louisiana, Texas and Utah “give partisan state-level actors control over election processes,” the center said in the analysis, which was produced with the Democracy Policy Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
In April, legislators passed a law that requires the state’s division of motor vehicles and the Secretary of State to compare registration rolls for noncitizens and investigate or remove them from the rolls.
Melissa Stiehler, a spokesperson for the Kansas voter access nonprofit Loud Light, said voting rights have become a popular focus for partisan legislation since the 2020 election. She said recently passed laws in Kansas restrict the freedom to vote, come at the expense of Kansans and favor exploiting fear and misinformation.
“Democracy is the freedom for all citizens to have an equal say in the decisions that impact our families and communities,” she said. “Attacking that freedom based on lies and disinformation is fundamentally anti-American.”
The laws listed in the center’s report were not the only election-related pieces of legislation passed in Kansas this year.
Kansans will vote in August 2026 on two constitutional amendments via ballot measures. One would add a requirement that voters must be citizens. The other would change the way Kansas Supreme Court justices are selected, shifting the method from a merit-based nomination system to a popular vote contest.
Arkansas and South Dakota voters are also expected to consider revising constitutional language to limit voting to only citizens in 2026, and Texas voters will do so in November.
“If they succeed, these initiatives will have no practical effect, as it is already a federal crime and a crime in all four of these states for noncitizens to vote,” the report said.
A slate of election procedures and voting provisions was nestled into House Bill 2016, which the governor signed in April. Among them were modified disclosures and requirements for advance ballot applications. Legislators reworked a 2021 law that restricted groups that sent advance ballot applications to voters. The law was challenged in federal court, focusing on prefilled, mailed ballot applications that voting organizations sent to hundreds of thousands of Kansans in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. A judge blocked the 2021 law in July, ruling that state lawmakers tried to suppress free speech.
Danielle Lang, the senior director for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, said in a July 31 interview that the 2025 changes appear “to be a recognition from the Legislature that the law it passed was wildly overbroad.” Those changes are still subject to the judge’s recent permanent injunction for part of the law.
However, Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, Attorney General Kris Kobach and Johnson County District Attorney Stephen Howe, who were the defendants in the lawsuit, appealed the decision in August to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.
While officials have maintained that the 2021 law was meant to address election fraud and promote election integrity, Lang disagrees. The law has nothing to do with those things, she said.
“Folks who work in elections, like myself, are really interested in having efficient election administration,” she said. “Often these laws are kind of papered over with this explanation, but they’re not actually geared at that at all.”
“My sense of things is that Americans support access to mail voting, and their legislators need to know that,” she said.
The Brennan Center’s roundup found that laws expanding voting access have decreased in frequency. About 30 were passed this year as of Oct. 6, which is fewer than the 53 enacted in 2023 and 62 in 2021, the report said. Thirty-two expansive laws were passed in 2024.
“The pace of democratic progress in many states has slowed just as democratic backsliding has accelerated in others,” the report said.
This story has been updated.
