Out-of-state Kansas voters say they’ve been kept waiting for mail-in ballots: ACLU
It took three separate applications, hours on the phone and months of waiting for Kiah Duggins to receive her mail-in ballot for Kansas.
Duggins, a 26-year-old third year Harvard Law student from Wichita, emailed the first application to Sedgwick County election authorities on Aug. 7.
On Oct. 20, seeing that her ballot still hadn’t been mailed yet, Duggins faxed in another application. When she called the Sedgwick County election commissioner’s office to make sure they received the fax, she was told to also mail an application.
It was only after numerous hours spent on phone calls and filling out applications over the last few months that her ballot finally arrived Wednesday, less than a week before the election.
“I was feeling overwhelmed because this election feels, in a lot of ways, out of the average citizen’s control,” she said. “The pandemic feels like it’s out of the average citizen’s control. And so any small thing that we can do to get even a little bit of control, like voting, feels more important than usual.”
Duggins was among seven Kansans living out of state who reached out to the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas to say they had problems receiving their mail-in ballots after submitting applications in August and September. The complaints, announced by the ACLU Thursday, come in an election year marked by high voter turnout and anxieties around ballot access during a pandemic.
The ACLU said a hotline is available for voters who need help with their ballots. The hotline, staffed by lawyers, can be reached at 866-687-8683.
“This is concerning because we’re seeing folks who are being disenfranchised through no fault of their own,” said Lauren Bonds, the legal director for the ACLU of Kansas.
Bonds thinks those who contacted the ACLU are likely only a small sampling of the total number of Kansans running into problems.
A couple of the voters have requested replacement ballots, she said. But if and when they receive them, they will likely be facing a time crunch to get them mailed back to Kansas in time to be counted.
One complaint to the ACLU came from a Kansas couple currently living in California, Bonds said. Like the other five, they used a ballot tracker to confirm that their ballot was mailed out. However, their mailbox is still empty.
While some Kansans living in-state may also still be waiting on their ballot, they have several ways to ensure their vote counts: they can request a replacement ballot, they can vote in person in advance through noon Monday, or they can vote in person on Election Day.
But if out-of-state voters don’t receive their mail-in ballot in time, their options for voting are scarce.
“You literally don’t have options other than buy a plane ticket or undertake thousands of miles of travel in some cases during a deadly pandemic,” she said. “And that should not be what people have to do in order to vote just because they live out of state.”
Bonds also worries that the difficulties they’re hearing about could disenfranchise people.
“I don’t think anyone wants to assume mal-intent,” she said. “This is a very complicated time. The USPS is under incredible stress obviously right now.”
Bonds said she thinks the Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab should extend the deadline through which ballots can be received.
Katie Koupal, Kansas deputy assistant secretary of state, said that with the exception of “some sort of catastrophic circumstances,” there are no plans to extend the deadline.
“We told them to change this close to the election would create voter confusion and give the appearance that we’re trying to influence the election,” she said Thursday.
The secretary of state’s office said that as of Thursday, mail ballots had been sent for all voters who submitted an advance voting ballot application.
Koupal said that while her office is aware of a handful of incidents where voters haven’t received their ballots, they haven’t seen widespread, systemic issues.
She said voters can work with local election officials to remedy problems.
For example, Koupal said, one local election office in Johnson County recently shipped a ballot to an out-of-state voter overnight.
Bonds said complications with mail-in voting could undermine future arguments for expanding mail ballot access. She fears it could cause some people to question election integrity and dissuade others from voting.
Duggins, the Harvard student, raised similar concerns to the secretary of state’s office after she was told in mid-October that her ballot hadn’t been sent yet because of a backlog in Sedgwick County.
She was told not to worry.
When her ballot finally appeared in her mailbox at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Duggins ran upstairs to fill it out and rushed to the post office before it closed.
While the process was mostly an annoyance to her, someone else might have found it to be a true hindrance to voting.
As she mailed her votes, Duggins, who is a Black woman, thought of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. She remembered the physical sacrifices her ancestors made in order to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
“I want to honor the sacrifices of the people in the past and in the present whose votes are suppressed” she said. “I felt as a relatively privileged person that the least I could do was fill out a ballot and send it in.”
She mailed her ballot overnight, so it would be counted before Nov. 3.
It cost her $26.50.
This story was originally published October 30, 2020 at 11:29 AM.
