Kansas Republicans have advanced legislation this year that would eliminate advance voting by mail altogether if courts ultimately strike down the state’s signature-verification requirement, a maneuver election-law observers call one of the most aggressive contingency plans attached to any mail-voting law in the country.
The Bill: Senate Bill 394
Senate Bill 394, drafted with the backing of the Kansas Secretary of State’s office, standardizes envelope language for advance ballots and attaches what’s known as a conditional repealer to the state’s long-standing signature-verification rule. If a court issues a final, nonappealable order invalidating that verification requirement, the secretary of state would be required to publish notice in the Kansas Register, and once published, the state’s entire statutory authorization for voting by mail would become void — leaving mail ballots available only where federal law specifically requires them.
Why Lawmakers Say It’s Necessary
Clay Barker, general counsel for the Kansas Secretary of State’s office, told a Senate committee that the signature-verification requirement is so intertwined with the mechanics of mail voting — the application, the envelope, the ballot itself — that the two cannot be separated. Kansas has required election officials to match a voter’s signature on the ballot envelope against the signature on file since 1995, and supporters argue that if a court strips out that safeguard, mail voting would become too vulnerable to fraud or error to continue in its current form.
The Litigation Driving the Bill
The signature-verification requirement is the subject of an ongoing challenge in League of Women Voters of Kansas v. Schwab, brought by the League of Women Voters of Kansas, Loud Light, the Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and the Topeka Independent Resource Center. Filed after Kansas Republicans passed House Bills 2183 and 2332 in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, the suit argues the laws — which also criminalize certain forms of voter assistance and restrict ballot collection — unduly burden the right to vote under the Kansas Constitution. A trial on the merits was held in Topeka earlier this year, with plaintiffs arguing that signature verification is applied inconsistently from one county to another, disenfranchising lawful voters who happen to live in a stricter jurisdiction.
A 2024 Ruling Set the Stage
The Kansas Supreme Court weighed in on the underlying law in 2024, ruling that signature verification was a valid legislative tool for determining whether someone is a qualified voter. But Justice Caleb Stegall, writing for the court, cautioned that the legislature must still comply with constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process, and sent the case back to the district court to examine whether the rule was being applied uniformly and whether voters were given reasonable notice and a chance to fix signature problems. That unresolved question is exactly what’s now back in front of a Shawnee County judge — and what Senate Bill 394 is designed to pre-empt.
Voting Rights Groups Push Back
Advocates say the bill amounts to a threat: strike down our law, and we’ll take away mail voting for everyone. Plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that rather than fixing the inconsistent county-by-county verification standards at the heart of their lawsuit, Republican lawmakers are trying to raise the stakes of a courtroom loss so high that judges will hesitate to rule against the state. Voting rights groups also note that older voters, voters with disabilities, and rural Kansans who rely on mail ballots would bear the brunt of any full repeal.
What’s Next
With the Kansas Supreme Court having already upheld a mail-ballot grace period ahead of this year’s primary, the fate of Senate Bill 394 and the underlying Schwab litigation now sits with the Shawnee County District Court, which must decide both whether the current verification process is unconstitutional and, if so, how quickly any ruling could trigger the bill’s repealer clause. With Kansas voters set to cast ballots in the November midterms, election officials, advocacy groups, and lawmakers are all watching the same docket to see whether Kansas becomes the first state to eliminate mail voting as a side effect of a voting-rights lawsuit rather than a direct legislative vote. Kansas has roughly 105 counties, each with its own election office responsible for comparing signatures, and voting rights groups say that patchwork of local practice is precisely what makes the current system vulnerable to a successful equal-protection challenge. Whatever the district court decides, both sides expect an appeal to the Kansas Supreme Court, meaning the ultimate fate of mail voting in the state may not be settled before the 2026 general election, and could instead shape how the legislature approaches elections law well into the next redistricting cycle.
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