Gov. Kelly's office reveals letter triggering meetings about "Compliance with Federal Voting Laws"
Gov. Kelly's office reveals letter triggering meetings about "Compliance with Federal Voting Laws"
Loud Light, Demos, ACLU sent letter to "Concerned Kansas Officials" in 2019
On Tuesday Gov. Laura Kelly’s office sent additional information related to Monday’s article, Gov. Laura Kelly Prefers Darkness in Open Records about 277,000 Voter Registrations in 2020. This new information answered two key questions:
Who and what triggered the meetings starting in 2019 to enable these registrations?
What were the problems with existing voter registration laws?
Letter of Concern
PDF of complete 13-page “Letter of Concern” received Tuesday from Ashley Stites-Hubbard, Deputy Counsel for the Governor:
Key information in letter
The “letter of concern” dated Nov. 13, 2019 was sent by representatives of Loud Light (Topeka), ACLU (Washington, DC and Overland Park), and Demos (Washington, DC and New York) to “Concerned Kansas Officials.”
The letter claimed “Kansas has reported extremely low numbers of voter registration applications generated through public assistance agencies” compared with Nevada as evidence of lack of “compliance with Section 7 of the NVRA.”
Loud Light, ACLU, and Demos conducted on-the-ground investigations of “Kansas practices, procedures, and policies for providing voter registration services required by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993” in “more than 20 motor vehicle and public assistance agency offices across the state.”
Nine specific counties were mentioned as part of the ground investigations: Douglas, Finney, Ford, Geary, Haskell, Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, Wyandotte.
Nine sections of the letter gave details about specific “Recommended Improvements,” which ranged from creating new policies and updating old policies to requesting actions by the Secretary of State.
Six of the nine “Recommended Improvements” involved the Secretary of State’s office.
One recommendation was for the Secretary of State to “ensure that paper voter registration forms … are properly coded to be able to determine origination” but then hide that information from the public: “any codes must not be decipherable by the public” supposedly to be in compliance with NVRA.
Some items from the Memorandum of Understanding Gov. Kelly signed can be traced to the letter. For example, sending registration forms when a box was not checked requesting one: “NVRA … requires that agencies provide voter registration forms to clients who leave the declination form blank.”
The letter was an invitation to “work together to bring Kansas into compliance with federal voting law.”
Information missing
Which “Concerned Kansas Officials” received a copy of the letter?
With so many improvements recommended for the Kansas Secretary of State, why do none of the emails obtained via KORA show any Secretary of State participants in the working group?
With a number of legal citations and legal precedents mentioned in the letter, why do none of the emails show participation by the Kansas Attorney General’s Office?
Were any members of the House Committee on Elections or the Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs included in the working group?
The letter has no mention that Loud Light would consider legal action if concerns were not addressed. The Memorandum of Understanding signed in late Sept. 2021 by Gov. Kelly and Loud Light said the agreement was necessary “in consideration of Loud Light’s agreement not to sue.”
Politics or settled law?
Gov. Kelly expanded voter registration using the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) and the Department for Children and Families (DCF) without transparency or “checks and balances” from the legislature, the Secretary of State, or the Attorney General’s office.
How did Gov. Kathleen Sebelius fail to take these actions when she was in office?
In June Stewart Whitson, the legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, published challenges to Kelly’s actions as part of a video, which is partially transcribed below:
“This scheme is using the resources and power of the executive branch to engage in election law making.”
“This is a get-out-the-vote effort designed by the left, to benefit the left, paid for on the backs of all taxpayers.”
They are “targeting those efforts to only a subgroup of voters, those voters that are more likely to vote Democrat.”
“They’re claiming they’re doing this in accordance with federal law, but that’s simply untrue.”
“The federal law they cite actually only requires the voter registration applications be made available at state welfare agency offices, and be distributed only by certain agencies and at certain specific times.”
“The Governor ordered her welfare agencies to mail voter registration forms to all welfare recipients outside the scope of what is required under the law. … She strategically timed the mailings so they were sent, not when the law requires, but rather strategically in the final months leading up to the 2020 election.”
“The only thing that’s been disclosed by the Governor has been disclosed in the wake of a press release given by Demos … Then the Governor rushed and released a press release to let the voters know.”
“Fast forward ... Demos lets the world know that there’s an agreement … a day later she releases a press release … that is a copy and paste essentially of the Demos press release.”
“This is about more than just election integrity. It’s about separation of powers, checks and balances, and each branch of government staying in its lane.”
Funding
Demos
Demos received $3.3 million in support from George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society in the years 2018-2020, some of which was “to remove barriers to voting and expand the electorate.”
Demos received $925K in 2017 and $125K in 2020 from Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund for “cutting-edge policy research” and “to continue its work enforcing the requirements of the National Voter Registration Act."
Loud Light
Both Loud Light and Loud Light Civic Action are incorporated in the State of Florida but operate exclusively in Kansas.
In 2020 Loud Light Civic Action, a 501(c)(4), received $75,000 from Arabella Advisors “dark money” New Venture Fund and $46,000 from SwingLeft via Tides Advocacy.
In 2020 and 2021 Loud Light and Neighboring Movement received a total of $300,000 from the Rural Democracy Initiative through their Heartland Fund.
The Heartland Fund received funding from the Arabella Advisors’ Windward Fund.
In this case some of that funding can be traced to other organizations such as Democracy Alliance, Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund.
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As far as I know the Secretary of State's office was excluded from any discussions about the consent decree. KDHE/DCF mailed out voter registration forms that were returned to the 105 clounty clerks/election offices.
The timeline is very messy.
A Nov. 13, 2019 email to “Concerned Kansas Officials” from Loud Light, Demos, ACLU Kansas, ACLU national, was revealed in an open records request in 2022. https://watchdoglab.substack.com/p/gov-kellys-office-reveals-letter The list of “Concerned Kansas Officials” has never been revealed.
An open records request to find out what happened after that 2019 email and before the mailing of voter registration forms in 2020 resulted in heavily-redacted emails. The open records reply revealed no one from the Secretary of State’s office was known to have been included in any of the meetings with the Governor’s office, Loud Light, and Demos. https://watchdoglab.substack.com/p/gov-laura-kelly-prefers-darkness A source says the Secretary of State’s office was never included in the discussions.
My current KORA request is an attempt to shed some light on what happened in 2020 when the Department of Children and Families (DCF) mailed voter registrations to 150,512 “applicants and clients” and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) mailed an additional 127,255 registration applications to “unduplicated applicants and clients.” This was all mentioned in the “Memorandum of Understand” (MOU) signed by Gov. Kelly, Lee Norman (KDHE) and Davis Hammet (Loud Light) from 9/29 through 10/1/2021. https://watchdoglab.substack.com/p/president-biden-and-kansas-gov-kelly
The information about the 277,000 voter registration forms was only known in 2020 because the nonprofit Demos bragged about what they had done in Kansas in a Sept. 23, 2020 online press release:
https://www.demos.org/press-release/new-voter-registration-opportunity-fills-gap-pandemic
Voter registration forms are usually returned to one of the 105 Kansas county clerks or election commissioners – so it’s likely the Secretary of State’s office knew very little about the huge mailing in 2020 by DCF/KDHE with the push from Gov. Kelly.
After Biden was elected in 2020, but before he took office, Demos published a “blueprint” in Dec. 2020 for what became Biden’s Executive Order, Promoting Access to Voting, on March 7, 2021. https://watchdoglab.substack.com/p/president-biden-is-pushing-to-federalize
This MOU was signed in 2021 after the 2020 mailing in Kansas, and after the 2021 presidential executive order. There is still a huge void in what happened in 2020 before the 277,000 voter registration forms were mailed.
Perhaps KDHE and DCF will eventually respond to KORA requests about what they did in 2020.