Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly Monday vetoed a bill that would require mail-in ballots be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day, though Republicans hope to override her veto.

Senate Bill 4 would repeal the state’s current three-day grace period that allows the counting of ballots up to three days after Election Day as long as they were postmarked beforehand.

Kelly claimed her veto was to protect rural voters especially from being left out due to slow delivery of ballots by the U.S. Post Office. “The goal was to ensure that all Kansans had their votes counted, no matter where they lived,” Kelly said in a veto message that called the bill “an attack on rural Kansans who want to participate in the electoral process …”

“The grace period was uncontroversial when passed” in 2017, reports the Topeka Capital-Journal, “but Republicans became increasingly skeptical of voting by mail following the 2020 election and claims of fraud by President Donald Trump.”

While the state Senate approved the bill with a veto-proof majority, the House approved it with only 80 votes in favor, four short of the total required for a veto override, but the Capital-Journal reports “four representatives that have voted for similar bills were absent” that day.

“We eagerly anticipate overriding the Governor’s misguided veto to safeguard our elections and ensure quick, reliable outcomes,” House Republican leaders said in a statement Monday afternoon. “By setting a firm election-day deadline, we reaffirm Kansans’ trust in our elections.”

“Joining the 32 states that have decided that Election Day should be Election Day is a positive step toward restoring voter confidence and ensuring every vote is counted in Kansas,” added Rep. Pat Proctor, R-Leavenworth, who is chair of the House Elections Committee.

Federal appeals court rulings generally only apply to their own circuits, but the U.S. 5th Circuit – which Kansas is not a part of – ruled last fall that ballots must by federal law be received by Election Day. That ruling is still working its way through the courts.

In its ruling, the 5th Circuit quoted Justice Brett Kavanaugh:

“As Justice Kavanaugh recently emphasized: ‘To state the obvious, a State cannot conduct an election without deadlines … A deadline is not unconstitutional merely because of voters’ own failures to take timely steps to ensure their franchise.'”

Proctor has alleged that two House races in Johnson County alone were flipped from Republican to Democrat in 2020 due to provisional and post-Election Day ballots.

“The Secretary of State told us in testimony on this bill that 2% of all mail-in ballots cast in the 2024 primary — nearly 1 in 3 of the ballots received during the three-day grace period — couldn’t be counted because they lacked a postmark,” Proctor told The Heartlander in a statement.

“Thirty-two other states have already solved this problem by requiring that ballots be received by Election Night to be counted. I am disappointed that [Kelly] would rather disenfranchise voters than admit that this 2017 law was a mistake.”

At least one Republican said he believes Kelly is more concerned about Democrat votes than rural ones.

“The governor is a liar,” immediate past Kansas GOP Chairman Mike Brown says in a statement to The Heartlander. “Like everything else that comes out of her mouth – and out of her office – it is some shade of the truth, but it’s never completely the truth.

“The fact is, she wants to keep voting open for those extra days to make sure she gets the votes that she and the Democrat Party want in to win. Nothing more complicated than that.”

“I think it just goes to show that Laura Kelly doesn’t really care about the Constitution,” adds local citizen election watchdog Thad Snider. “Accepting ballots after Election Day is already unconstitutional, and that’s been ruled on by the 5th Circuit.”

Snider noted the nationwide election results — many of them questionable — in the 2020 election.

“Counting went on for weeks. And it just happened recently in California, where ballots were coming in [post-election]. It took them – what, eight weeks? – to finish counting their election.

“And then locally, this happened in 2021 in the Jennifer Gilmore race for school board in Olathe, as she was winning on Election Day – and then it just so happened three days after Election Day enough ballots showed up to swing the election in her opponent’s favor.”

Melissa Stiehler, advocacy director at Loud Light, a progressive voter and civic engagement advocacy group, takes issue with the Legislature’s bill.

“Regardless of policy positions or partisanship, it’s disappointing to see so many of our political leaders with such a deep misunderstanding of Kansas elections,” Stiehler wrote in an email to The Heartlander.

“The data collected by the Kansas Secretary of State shows that only 78 ballots were reported to have a missing postmark in the primary election, and that rural voters in Republican strongholds benefitted twice as often from the mail processing period as other voters.

“Mail delays are a government failure. It’s well within a state’s right to make policies to protect their citizens from federal government inefficiencies, which is why the grand majority of court rulings have affirmed that the mail processing period is constitutional.”