Frustrated by slowing mail delivery, particularly in rural areas, the Kansas legislature in 2017 passed a law to let elections officials count mail ballots that arrived after Election Day, for up to three extra days, so long as the ballots were postmarked before polls closed. Kansas politicos joined other states with such a policy in calling this a “grace period.”
“Because that’s exactly what it was,” Jamie Shew, the clerk and top elections official in Douglas County, home to the city of Lawrence, told Bolts last week. “It was providing some grace for someone who did what they were supposed to do. We wanted to make sure those ballots counted.”
The reform drew zero committee testimony in opposition. Lawmakers voted 163-1 for it. Even Kansas’ then-secretary of state, Republican Kris Kobach, a longtime champion of voter restrictions who that same year helped run President Trump’s commission to investigate election fraud, wrote a letter of support: Kansans voting by mail need a little wiggle room, he told lawmakers, as a result of the U.S. Postal Service reducing processing sites in the state.
“There was universal acceptance because it just made sense,” said Shew, who helped draft the legislation and is now in his third decade as county clerk.
This was a popular line of thought around the country, and by the 2020 election nearly half of U.S. states—blue, red, and swing alike—had adopted their own grace-period laws.
Fast forward to this year: Republican politicians nationwide now can’t stand grace periods.
This past March alone brought news that two states—Kansas among them—will repeal their grace periods; that conservative federal judges are on the brink of killing grace periods in two other states; and that Trump, who for years has falsely alleged rampant mail-voting fraud, wants to pressure the rest of the nation to reject every mail ballot that arrives after polls close.
In Kansas, the Republicans who control the statehouse passed a bill this spring to end the grace period they’d created in 2017. In elections starting in 2026, any mail ballot received after 7 p.m. on Election Day will be tossed, even if it was postmarked in time.
Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed the bill, but Republicans had enough votes to override her. The bill, Kelly wrote in a veto letter, would “disenfranchise thousands of Kansas voters,” and constitutes “an attack” on rural voters because mail service is often slower for them than for people in cities.
Utah Republicans adopted a similar change just two weeks before Kansas, ending their state’s grace period amid a broad crackdown on mail voting. West Virginia is considering a bill to join them. …