Each week during the 2025 Kansas legislative session, we will provide Johnson County lawmakers the opportunity to share their thoughts about what is happening in the state capitol.
The views expressed in each Capitol Update are solely those of the lawmaker. The topics are of the lawmakers’ choosing and are not fact-checked.
Below is a submission from Democratic Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin, who represents Kansas House District 20, covering parts of Leawood and Overland Park.
The Post has also extended invitations to submit Capitol Updates this week to Democratic Sen. Cindy Holscher of Overland Park and Republican Rep. Adam Turk of Shawnee.
Imagine a Kansas where your only option to vote in elections is IN PERSON, ON ELECTION DAY. That’s it. That’s your ONLY option unless you are a service member or severely disabled.
It sounds beyond dystopian, but that is the vision of the Kansas House Election Committee’s chairman, Representative Pat Proctor.
Senate Bill 4, which eliminates the three-day grace period (passed into law almost unanimously in 2017), is his first step to getting us there.
You don’t have to believe me: see it here for yourself with comments Proctor made in a private Zoom call with Johnson County Republicans earlier this year. Rep. Proctor later refused to answer questions about his comments on that video on the House floor.
Gov. Laura Kelly on Monday vetoed the bill, the same as she has done in the past and the legislature sustained. Now that she has done that, this is your call to action to save all forms of advanced voting by telling your representatives to vote to sustain a gubernatorial veto and not allow Rep. Proctor’s vision to become reality.
One thing that came to light after our vote on the floor is how many legislators had not seen Proctor’s video. Has yours?
These Johnson County legislators voted to take this first step towards eliminating practically all advance voting in Kansas:
- Senators: Gossage, Rose, Shane, Thomas, Thompson and Warren
- Representatives: Barth, Bohi, Croft, Esau, Essex, Resman, Stiens, Sutton, Tarwater, Turk, Turner, and VanHouden.
- Absent and not voting: Rep. Williams
Our Johnson County legislators can be the last stand against Rep. Proctor’s plan.
Call to action now that Gov. Kelly have vetoed SB 4
Look up your Kansas legislators here: https://pluralpolicy.com/find-your-legislator/
Email/call both your state senator and representative and let them know that you want them to sustain a Governor’s veto of SB4.
Send them Proctor’s video, in case they voted “yes” on SB4, not realizing they were voting for the first step of his vision to eliminate practically all advanced voting.
Even if you might agree with ending the three-day grace period for mail ballots, you or a loved one may be one of 209,305 voters in Johnson County across party lines who voted in person in advance during the 2024 election.
SB 4 is Proctor’s first step to ending that for us.
We all know that mail service has not improved since 2017. SB4 is not about improving voter confidence in our elections. If it were, the House would have adopted Rep. Heather Meyer’s amendment to send mail ballots 45 days before an election instead of 20, (which we already do for military and overseas voters) as noted in Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s neutral testimony.
Schwab’s testimony read, in part, “Kansas has a comparatively short time-period in which ballots are mailed out and must be returned. Most states mail ballots to voters more than 30 days, many 45 days, before the election. Kansas mails ballots out 20 days before the election.”
Guess which Johnson County representatives voted “no” on that common sense solution? Same as above.
Here is the my argument I made for the amendment, speaking on the House floor.
Now is the time to fight your voting rights, Johnson County!
