After Kobach’s 2018 bid, Kansas lawmakers weigh making secretary of state non-partisan

When then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the state’s chief elections officer, won a chaotic 2018 Republican primary for governor by a razor-thin margin, it prompted concerns about conflict of interest.

A bill to prevent that scenario, in which a Kobach-like figure could oversee elections while campaigning for governor or Congress, is drawing some interest from Kansas lawmakers. The legislation is sponsored by a Democrat but nevertheless set to receive a hearing in a Republican-controlled committee on Thursday – a sign that legislators want to at least explore the proposal.

Under the bill, Kansas voters would choose a secretary of state in a non-partisan election. It would mark a big change from the current system, in which Republicans, Democrats and other parties compete for the statewide office.

Additionally, the secretary of state would have to resign before running for a partisan office.

The secretary of state is not typically a high-profile position in state government. While the secretary runs elections, much of the work centers around managing a slew of routine business filings and other official documents.

The bill demonstrates how Kobach’s turbulent tenure still reverberates within the Capitol more than a year after he left office. He used the post as a platform for decrying illegal immigration and voter fraud, the latter a crusade to address a problem for which there was scant evidence and that amounted to voter suppression, his critics charged.

He is now a candidate in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate.

“I don’t think you saw the secretary of state position weaponized in a way, in our history, like it had been really over the last decade,” said Davis Hammet, president of the Kansas-based civic engagement organization Loud Light. “It was this, in many ways, this obscure and ministerial job and then it became this very heavy, politicized weapon.”

A recount, run by a candidate?

Rep. Brett Parker, an Overland Park Democrat sponsoring the bill, said the chief election officer should be as far removed from partisan interests as possible.

“It’s foundational to our democracy and we’d like to do everything we can to build the public trust in that and remove any negative incentives for the officeholder,” Parker said.

Parker first filed a version of the bill in February 2018 but it died in committee. He said he wanted to revisit the idea after the 2018 election.

Kobach’s dual role as candidate and chief election officer came under intense scrutiny in the days after the Republican primary for governor.

Kobach and Gov. Jeff Colyer came out of Election Day separated by just a few hundred votes, but provisional ballots across the state held the power to change the margin. The result was so close that talk of a possible recount began. The cost of the recount would have been set by Kobach’s office.

Kobach initially refused to recuse himself from his election duties, a decision assailed by legal and political experts. A few days later, he reversed himself and appointed Eric Rucker, an assistant secretary of state, to lead in his place even though Rucker had donated $1,000 to Kobach’s campaign.

Kobach condemned the bill Wednesday, saying it’s based on “the illusion that a politician elected in an election without party labels somehow loses all preferences and principles.”

“All it would do is make it less clear what that person stands for. That would, in turn, make it easier to conceal the politician’s intentions from voters. That’s exactly what Kansas Democrat politicians have been doing for years,” Kobach said in a statement.

Current Secretary of State Scott Schwab declined a request for comment.

Party labels are hard to remove

Rep. Blake Carpenter, a Derby Republican who sits on the House Elections Committee, said he’s interested in hearing testimony about the bill but would probably oppose moving to a non-partisan election. Election law is very partisan across the country, he said, adding that Democrats and Republicans have different philosophies about what to do with the secretary of state’s office.

“Even though you’d say it’s non-partisan, I think it’d still be partisan,” Carpenter said.

Chris Biggs, a former Democratic secretary of state who ran unsuccessfully against Kobach, said no bill could control what issues candidates will run on. Biggs allowed that making the election non-partisan could put the focus more on a candidate’s technical skills and how they would run the office, but he appeared skeptical.

“As long as it’s an elected office and as long as it’s a democracy and long as people are allowed to run for the office, I think they’re going to make political issues out of whatever their belief system is or whatever they think people will respond to,” Biggs said. “And I don’t know that taking away the party label officially accomplishes much.”

Most secretaries of state are either Republicans or Democrats, according to the National Association of Secretaries of State. The group records just one – the secretary of state of Puerto Rice – as not having a party preference.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, has long advocated for non-partisan secretary of state offices. But he said in an email that he’s “not a big fan” of making that happen through non-partisan elections.

“We have those for lots of state judicial elections, as in Wisconsin, and it is clear that many state supreme court judges run as Democrats or Republicans without the formal label,” Hasen said.

His own preference would be for a system where a governor nominates a secretary, who is then confirmed with 75 percent support from the Legislature. The nominee would have to have the support of both parties to get into office.

Parker said party affiliation says a lot less about how someone will perform as secretary of state than when someone is a lawmaker or governor. A non-partisan election would make clear that “we are just trying to, as a state, hire the most qualified, experienced person to run our elections,” he said.