Kansas court rejects last-minute GOP bid to toss late-arriving mail ballots

In a voting rights victory, the Kansas Court of Appeals Monday rejected Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s (R) emergency bid to reinstate a rule that could have thrown out lawfully cast mail ballots.

The ruling keeps Kansas’ mail ballot grace period in place for the August primary. That means voters’ ballots can still count if they are postmarked by Election Day but received up to three days after.

Schwab had asked the appeals court to pause a lower court ruling that blocked Senate Bill 4 (SB 4). The Republican-backed law would eliminate Kansas’ three-day grace period for mail-in ballots.

Without the grace period, election officials could reject ballots that arrive after 7 p.m. on Election Day — even when voters mailed them on time.

The appeals court refused to allow that to happen.

“If we were to grant the requested stay, those votes would be void,” the court wrote. “This very real and irreparable harm — that the votes of well-meaning Kansans, acting in good faith based on a judicial decision, would not be counted — outweighs the administrative burden of counting the mail-in ballots received within three days after Election Day.”

As a result, Kansas election officials must continue counting ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within the following three days.

The ruling is a significant defeat for Schwab’s last-minute push to bring back the anti-voting restriction before next week’s primary.

Advance voting had already begun when Schwab asked the court to step in. Tens of thousands of mail-in ballots had already been sent to voters.

Schwab claimed the grace period would confuse voters. His office had spent months telling Kansans that ballots had to arrive by Election Day. Ballot instructions also listed the 7 p.m. Election Day deadline.

But the appeals court found that changing the rules again during an active election could cause even more harm.

Some voters may have seen the lower court’s ruling and relied on it. They may mail their ballots by Election Day expecting them to count if they arrive within three days.

If the court had granted Schwab’s request, those ballots could have been thrown out.

The court found that this risk of disenfranchisement outweighed the burden on election officials of counting a small number of additional ballots. Kansas used a three-day grace period from 2017 until Republican lawmakers passed SB 4 in 2025.

The policy gives election officials extra time to receive ballots that were mailed on time but delayed by the postal system.

That safeguard has protected thousands of Kansas voters.

In 2024, 2,110 mail-in ballots arrived during the three days after Election Day. The grace period also protected about 1,000 ballots in 2022 and roughly 32,000 during the mail-heavy 2020 election.

Voting rights groups challenged SB 4 before it took effect.

They argued that voters should not lose their ballots because of mail delays they cannot control.

Earlier this month, Douglas County District Court Judge Carl Folsom temporarily blocked the law while the lawsuit continues. Folsom found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in showing that SB 4 violates the Kansas Constitution’s protections for voting, equal protection and due process.

The lower court also found that the law would hit some voters harder than others, including rural voters, voters with disabilities and people temporarily living outside Kansas, such as college students.

Data from the 2024 election showed that ballots arrived during the grace period at more than twice the rate in Kansas’ most rural counties compared with its most urban counties.

Schwab appealed the ruling and filed several emergency requests seeking to put the Election Day deadline back into effect.

He argued that courts should avoid changing election rules close to an election.

The appeals court agreed that last-minute changes can be dangerous. But it found that Schwab was asking the court to change the rules again after voting had already started.

That could have caused voters who relied on the lower court’s ruling to lose their votes.

The Kansas outcome comes just about a month after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Watson v. Republican National Committee.

In that case, the Court rejected the Republican argument that federal Election Day laws bar states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

The decision left states; authority to keep grace periods like the one Kansas voters have relied on since 2017.

Monday’s ruling does not end the case, however.

The appeals court did not decide whether SB 4 is ultimately unconstitutional. It only rejected Schwab’s emergency attempt to enforce the law during the appeal.

But for the August primary, the result is clear.Kansas voters who mail their ballots by Election Day will not lose their votes because of a short postal delay, as long as election officials receive them within the three-day grace period.