Will Kansas Finally Start Registering the Thousands of Voters It Illegally Blocked?

The district court set a June 14 deadline for the state to start.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris KobachPete Marovich/Zuma

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Tuesday is a big day for thousands of potential voters in Kansas who were blocked from registering to vote by a 2013 state law that required proof of citizenship to register. Or at least it’s supposed to be. The law was recently overturned in court, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s court-mandated deadline to begin the process of registering at least 18,000 people who were affected by the measure was this Tuesday. Whether he’s actually started to do so remains unclear.

The situation dates back to February, when the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kansas, and a local law firm sued Kobach over the law that required additional proof of citizenship from people registering to vote while applying for or renewing driver’s licenses. The US District Court for the District of Kansas agreed with the ACLU in May, and a federal appeals court concurred last week, setting a deadline of June 14 for Kobach to being registering voters.

The district court judge said that the law likely violated the National Voter Registration Act, according to the Associated Press, which mandates that states require only “minimal information” to determine a voter’s eligibility for federal elections. Kobach argued that throwing out the law would create a heavy administrative burden, as it could potentially affect 50,000 voters in the state. The AP noted that the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirement hit young voters the hardest. People between the ages of 18 and 29 make up 14.9 percent of the state’s registered voters but 58 percent of voters whose registrations were canceled or suspended under the law.

“Secretary Kobach has repeatedly stood in the way of thousands of Kansans who have tried to exercise their right to vote,” Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “Today that ends. He must let them vote.”

Kobach’s office told Mother Jones on Tuesday that the secretary of state had no comment about the deadline.

 

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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