This campaign season, Post editor Kyle Palmer has extended offers for one-on-one Q-&-As to all candidates running for statewide offices, including U.S. Senate, Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and Kansas State Board of Education.
We will publish videos of Kyle’s full interviews and an edited transcript of his conversations as each candidate responds.
Look back at Kyle’s past interviews with U.S. Senate candidate Adam Hamilton, gubernatorial candidate Cindy Holscher, third-party Secretary of State candidate Scott Morgan and Kansas State Board of Education candidate Jim McMullen.
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Kansas voters will choose a new Secretary of State this November. That’s the official who oversees our elections and also registers businesses, among other duties.
Democrat Jennifer Day of Johnson County is a former state representative and also a longtime county poll worker.
She faces Republican state representative Pat Proctor of Leavenworth, as well as a third-party candidate, United Kansas’s Scott Morgan.
Watch the full interview
Read the highlights
The transcript below has been edited for clarity, length and grammar.
Post: Some Johnson County voters may remember you for your brief stint in the Statehouse. You served about a year after being appointed to fill a seat in Overland Park, and then you moved out of the district, so you had to relinquish that seat. But introduce yourself to voters again. Why are you coming back for a statewide job?
Day: I’m a former legislator. I’m a small business owner. I have been doing that since 2013, and I have been a longtime election worker here in the county. Because of my involvement in various organizations and my passion for voter education and voter access, the Secretary of State position has become really important to me. [Running] is something that I’ve considered in the past, but with it being an open seat this year, it seemed like a good timing issue for me to go ahead and jump into the race.
Post: You’ve mentioned that you worked at polling sites in Johnson County, I think, since 2018. What have you seen and experienced up close working at poll sites that maybe most voters never see about our election process that you think is important to communicate to them?
Day: I encourage as many people as possible to take advantage of jumping into that themselves: Volunteer to be an election worker. It’s so great. You get to see the behind-the-scenes [work]. You get to see how things work because of the training that goes into each election cycle. I’ve served as a supervising judge since 2022, and I think that because of my willingness to go wherever they need me in the county, I have not just worked at one polling location. I’ve worked in Shawnee. I’ve worked in south Overland Park. I’ve worked in Lenexa, and then in Mission for the advance voting period. I think that hands-on experience gives you a really good insight into what voters are going through on Election Day and during the advance voting period, as well as what it is that the office needs to do and what all of our offices across the state of Kansas need to do in order to administer safe, secure, accurate elections that are accessible for all of our voters.
Post: For the last 10 or 15 years, there have been doubts raised about the process, about voting, about the sanctity and security of the vote. You have that behind-the-scenes look: how secure are our elections in Johnson County?
Day: They’re secure across the state of Kansas, not just in Johnson County. I will say that was a big driver for me, as well: the attacks on secretaries of state across the U.S. and the questions that people had about our election process after the 2020 election. When I saw people doubting what was happening with our elections, that drove me crazy. Even as someone who’d only worked elections for a couple of years at that point, I knew how safe and accurate our elections were, and so I’ve long been defending that and telling people to volunteer to work as an election worker. You get to see so much of the process and learn about our laws that we have in place, the statutes that guide our election processes and protect the safety, the security, that accuracy that we all so depend on. A lot of people aren’t aware of our regular auditing process that must occur after each election across the state of Kansas. That is what maintains the integrity and accuracy of our elections. But there’s also a lot of stuff that happens prior to the election that our election officials must do ahead of time to ensure that our ballots are counted accurately and effectively.
Post: Your Republican opponent in this race, Representative Pat Proctor, has said things like elections are under what he’s termed a “concerted leftist attack.” I will also note we’ve extended an invitation for him to talk with us. But is that the biggest difference between you and him? Your viewpoints on the security of elections, the trust that voters can have in elections?
Day: I can’t speak for what [Proctor] truly believes about our election processes, but I will say that I think the hands-on experience that I have is what sets me apart from my opponents. Those county clerks are the ones administering our elections every year, and I don’t know that he has a great perspective on how safe and secure our elections already are. The policies he’s been promoting seem to be an attempt to make it harder for us to vote in the state. And I know that he has concerns about advance voting and mail ballots that I just do not share. Those opportunities [to vote early] are really important for us in this modern day and age. We would not be able to effectively administer elections in just one election day across the state of Kansas. Here in Johnson County, we would be disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters. So I think it’s important that we promote policy that actually allows for good access while maintaining the safety and security that we have in place with our laws.
Post: You promise to restore the three-day mail ballot grace period. I know that’s on hold now, so that will be in effect for this current election, and also expanding advance voting from 20 to 30 days. Both of those policies would need to be passed by the Legislature. So you can advocate for these positions as a Democratic officeholder, but you’d be facing Republican supermajorities in Topeka. What can you actually do on day one without maybe these policies being put into law?
Day: I’m not making promises. It’s something that I advocate for and have been advocating for and would continue to do. I think it’s important that you have someone in this position who can have a good relationship with our legislators across the board. While I was in office, I had respect from both sides of the aisle. I think I’ve carried on with that with some of those relationships since I left office, even five years later. I’m still in contact with a lot of those folks, and I think that being able to express that perspective from the hands-on experience that I have as an election worker and having worked with election officials for a while, talking to the county clerks that I have for the last year, I’ve been campaigning. That’s really important, but also being able to be ready to listen and hear what their concerns are. When I was in office in 2021, I actually encouraged all of my colleagues in the House to go back and try volunteering to work an election in their county, so they could see firsthand how great the processes were because they were working so hard to pass a lot of policies that would make it harder for us to administer our elections.
Post: You’ve called federal interference one of the biggest challenges facing the [Secretary of State’s] office. If you are elected, your first two years will be under the Trump administration, which has increasingly put pressure on states to give up local voter data. If that ask is made of you as Secretary of State, what would be your response?
Day: No. We don’t need help from the federal level in administering our elections here in Kansas. We’ve been doing just fine without them. We have great election officials in place, both in the Secretary of State’s office, who has experience and knowledge on how to help our clerks across the state best administer for their voters in their particular communities, and federal interference is only serving to try to gum up what our processes already are. Our laws are fantastic. We have a lot of really great laws in place, and if federal officials wanted some explanation about how great those work for us already, I’d be happy to share that information with them.
Post: There is a Kansas SAVE Act that was passed, I believe, over Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto earlier this year. It does require regular checks against what would be a federal SAVE database, including DMV and Social Security records. Is there use in regularly checking data to make sure that the voter rolls are clean, that there isn’t any sort of illegal or fraudulent voting going on?
Day: We just need to make sure that if we’re using systems like that, we are not using them in a slapdash manner. We’ve got to make sure that we are implementing them appropriately, so that we’re not accidentally removing actual qualified citizens from our voter rolls, especially without their knowledge. And it’s important that we are very deliberative in those processes. So I would like to encourage the Legislature to revisit those kinds of procedures and consider what kind of impacts they could have in the long term.
Post: Given your experience working directly in Johnson County polling places as a volunteer and judge, what do you make of the decision earlier this year to close eight early voting sites by Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt? And as Secretary of State, I don’t know if you would necessarily be able to control what the Johnson County Election Commissioner is able to do, but what input would you give?
Day: As Secretary of State, they actually don’t have a lot of input. They don’t have input on how many election sites are open on Election Day or during the advance voting period. That is entirely up to the counties themselves. I’ve been working advance voting since 2022. I’ve worked under three different commissioners in that time, and Connie is one of them. Fred Sherman [Schmidt’s successor] expanded advance voting locations, and I can’t speak to what the reasons were for why they needed to or felt the need to close those locations this year, but I will say that we have really great access here in Johnson County. We’re lucky to have as many advance voting locations as we do. But we do want to make sure that we are servicing the population of our voters in the best way possible and giving everyone the best opportunity that they can to vote in whatever manner is going to work well for their schedule. I trust that Connie Schmidt and her team are well experienced and have the best interests in mind of both what the office needs to do but also to service our voters. I know that they are like me. They want more people to participate in the process and to be able to do so comfortably and effectively for our voting population.
Post: The Secretary of State is kind of like a referee for elections. You’re supposed to administer elections impartially, even if you are running under a partisan label. You are running as a Democrat, but you were formerly a registered Republican. Why should a Johnson County Republican trust you to call balls and strikes, as it were, regarding state elections?
Day: I see this as a nonpartisan position in our executive level of government, and as someone who’s been working elections for many years, I have never looked at who’s coming through the door and made a guess as to how they’re registered or what their affiliation is. I’m just glad they’re there to be a part of the process, and I think that it’s important to have someone in this position who has that same kind of perspective, who is wanting to ensure that all of our eligible Kansas voters want to vote and understand that it’s important that they have their voice heard. We need to make sure that we are advocating for policies that are best for all Kansans, as opposed to just one party or another. I don’t want to put my finger on the scale in any way. I’m not looking for headlines in this position. I think that this should be an office that is under most people’s radar. I do hope that most folks understand this is going to be on their ballot. That’s my biggest concern: that they don’t know that the Secretary of State is something that they get to vote on. It should be a nonpartisan position, or someone who’s in this office should see it as a nonpartisan role.
