| Secretary of state of the State of Kansas | |
|---|---|
 Seal of the secretary of state of Kansas | |
| Inaugural holder | John Winter Robinson |
| Formation | February 1861 |
| Website | sos |
The secretary of state of Kansas is one of the constitutional officers of the U.S. state of Kansas. The current secretary of state is the former speaker pro tempore of the Kansas House of Representatives, Scott Schwab, who was sworn in on January 14, 2019. [1]
The first secretary of state for Kansas was John Winter Robinson, a physician originally from Litchfield, Maine, but who had settled in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1857. Robinson was elected in December 1859, in anticipation of statehood for Kansas, and sworn in after Kansas was admitted to the Union in February 1861. [2]
As a result of a bond scandal, Robinson was impeached on February 26, 1862, along with the governor, Charles L. Robinson, and state auditor, George S. Hillyer. Robinson was convicted by the Kansas Senate on June 12, 1862, and removed from his office, becoming the first state executive branch official to be impeached and removed from office in U.S. history. Hillyer was also removed from office, on June 16, but Governor Robinson was acquitted. Sanders R. Shepard succeeded to the job of secretary of state on July 28, 1862. [2]
In 2015, Secretary Kris Kobach requested and was granted by the Kansas Legislature prosecutorial power in voter fraud cases. In October that year, he filed his first three-vote fraud cases dealing with voting in two states. [3]
The secretary of state is the chief elections officer of the state, administering elections and voter registration throughout the state. The office also receives campaign finance reports and registers lobbyists. The duty of regulating lobbying and campaign finance is shared with the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. The secretary was granted by the Kansas Legislature prosecutorial power in voter fraud cases and is the first and only secretary of state to hold that power. [3]
The secretary operates the Business Filing Center, which registers business entities, trademarks, trade names and liens made pursuant to the Uniform Commercial Code.
The secretary regulates a wide variety of businesses, including sports agents, trade unions, cemeteries and funeral homes.
The Secretary's Publications Section is responsible for publishing various legal and informational documents for the state including statutory and administrative law publications such as session laws, regulations and the state's gazette, the Kansas Register. [4]
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| Name | Term | Party |
|---|---|---|
| Daniel Woodson | 1854–1857 | Democratic |
| Frederick P. Stanton | 1857 | |
| James W. Denver | 1857–1858 | |
| Hugh Sleight Walsh | 1858–1860 | |
| George M. Beebe | 1860–1861 |
| Image | Name | Term | Party |
|---|---|---|---|
| John Winter Robinson | 1861–1862 | Republican | |
| Sanders Rufus Shepherd | 1862–1863 | ||
| Warren Wirt Henry Lawrence | 1863–1865 | ||
| Rinaldo Allen Barker | 1865–1869 | ||
 | Thomas Moonlight | 1869–1871 | |
| William Hillary Smallwood | 1871–1875 | ||
| Thomas Horne Cavanaugh | 1875–1879 | ||
| James Smith | 1879–1885 | ||
| Edwin Bird Allen | 1885–1889 | ||
| William Higgins | 1889–1893 | ||
| Russell Scott Osborn | 1893–1895 | Populist | |
| William Corydon Edwards | 1895–1897 | Republican | |
| William Eben Bush | 1897–1899 | Populist | |
| George Alfred Clark | 1899–1903 | Republican | |
| Joel Randall Burrow | 1903–1907 | ||
| Charles Eugene Denton | 1907–1911 | ||
| Charles Harrison Sessions | 1911–1915 | ||
| John Thomas Botkin | 1915–1919 | ||
 | Lewis Julian Pettijohn | 1919–1922 | |
| David Owen McCray | 1922–1923 | ||
| Frank Joseph Ryan | 1923–1929 | ||
| Edgbert Albert Cornell | 1929–1933 | ||
| Frank Joseph Ryan | 1933–1949 | ||
| Larry Ryan | 1949–1951 | Democratic | |
| Paul R. Shanahan | 1951–1966 | Republican | |
| Elwill M. Shanahan | 1966–1978 | ||
| Jack Brier | 1978–1987 | ||
 | Bill Graves | 1987–1995 | |
| Ron Thornburgh | 1995–2010 | ||
 | Chris Biggs | 2010–2011 | Democratic |
 | Kris Kobach | 2011–2019 | Republican |
 | Scott Schwab | 2019–present |
Kris William Kobach is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the attorney general of Kansas since 2023. He previously served as the 31st secretary of state of Kansas from 2011 to 2019.
The Kansas Legislature is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Kansas. It is a bicameral assembly, composed of the lower Kansas House of Representatives, with 125 state representatives, and the upper Kansas Senate, with 40 state senators. Representatives are elected for two-year terms, senators for four-year terms.
The Kansas Senate is the upper house of the Kansas Legislature, the state legislature of the U.S. State of Kansas. It is composed of 40 senators elected from single-member districts, each with a population of about 73,000 inhabitants. Members of the Senate are elected to a four-year term. There is no limit to the number of terms that a senator may serve. The Kansas Senate meets at the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka.
Derek Larkin Schmidt is an American lawyer and politician who served as the Kansas Attorney General from 2011 to 2023. A Republican, Schmidt was first elected to office serving in the Kansas Senate, where he represented the 15th district from 2001 to 2011, and served as Agriculture Committee chairman and Senate majority leader. Schmidt became the state attorney general in 2011, after he defeated incumbent Democrat Stephen Six.
Charles Lawrence Robinson was an American politician who served in the California State Assembly from 1851 to 1852, and later as the first Governor of Kansas from 1861 until 1863. He was also the first governor of a US state to be impeached by a state legislature, although he was found not guilty during subsequent State Senate impeachment trial and was not removed from office. After his time as governor he served in the Kansas Senate from 1873 to 1881. To date, he is the only governor of Kansas to be impeached.
The government of the U.S. state of Kansas, established by the Kansas Constitution, is a republican democracy modeled after the Federal Government of the United States. The state government has three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. Through a system of separation of powers, or "checks and balances," each of these branches has some authority to act on its own, and also some authority to regulate the other two branches, so that all three branches can limit and balance the others' authority.
The following table indicates the party of elected officials in the U.S. state of Kansas:
Laura Jeanne Kelly is an American politician serving since 2019 as the 48th governor of Kansas. A member of the Democratic Party, she represented the 18th district in the Kansas Senate from 2005 to 2019. Kelly was elected governor in 2018, defeating Republican nominee Kris Kobach. She was reelected in 2022, narrowly defeating Republican nominee Derek Schmidt by a 2.21% margin.
Julie Ann Robinson is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Kansas.
Scott Joseph Schwab is an American politician serving as the 32nd Secretary of State of Kansas. He served as a member of the Kansas House of Representatives, representing the 49th district, from 2009 to 2019. He also served as Speaker pro tempore of the Kansas House of Representatives from 2017 to 2019. He received national attention when his son, Caleb, was killed in an accident on the Schlitterbahn Kansas City, Kansas water park's Verrückt water slide. In November 2018, he was elected Kansas Secretary of State.
Jeffrey William Colyer is an American surgeon and politician who served as the 47th governor of Kansas from January 31, 2018, to January 14, 2019. A member of the Republican Party, he was the 49th lieutenant governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018. Colyer served in the Kansas House of Representatives from 2007 to 2009 and the Kansas Senate from 2009 to 2011. He assumed the governorship when Sam Brownback resigned to become United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. Colyer ran for a full term as governor in 2018, but narrowly lost the Republican primary to Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, who in turn lost the general election to Democratic nominee Laura Kelly.
Voter suppression in the United States consists of various legal and illegal efforts to prevent eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. Such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, economic, gender, age and disability discrimination. After the American Civil War, all African-American men were granted voting rights, but poll taxes or language tests were used to limit and suppress the ability to register or cast a ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 improved voting access. Since the beginning of voter suppression efforts, proponents of these laws have cited concerns over electoral integrity as a justification for various restrictions and requirements, while opponents argue that these constitute bad faith given the lack of voter fraud evidence in the United States.
Jeremy Ryan Claeys is a member of the Kansas Senate and a former member of the Kansas House of Representatives.
The 2020 United States Senate election in Kansas was held on November 3, 2020, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Kansas, concurrently with the 2020 U.S. presidential election, as well as other elections to the United States Senate, elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections.
Roger Wayne Marshall is an American politician, physician, and former military officer serving as the junior United States senator from Kansas since 2021. A member of the Republican Party, he served from 2017 to 2021 as the U.S. representative for Kansas's 1st congressional district, a mostly rural district covering much of the western and northern parts of the state.
Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck was a database in the United States which aggregated voter registration records from multiple states to identify voters who may have registered or voted in two or more states. Crosscheck was developed in 2005 by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh in conjunction with Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska. In December 2019, the program was suspended indefinitely as part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas challenging Kansas' management of the program. Prior to Crosscheck's legally mandated suspension, a dozen states had withdrawn from the program citing the inaccurate data and risk of violating voters' privacy rights. Crosscheck was also accused of facilitating unlawful purges of voters in a racially discriminatory manner.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, also called the Voter Fraud Commission, was a Presidential Commission established by Donald Trump that ran from May 11, 2017, to January 3, 2018. The Trump administration said the commission would review claims of voter fraud, improper registration, and voter suppression. The establishment of the commission followed Trump's false claim that millions of illegal immigrants had voted in the 2016 presidential election, costing him the popular vote. Vice President Mike Pence was chosen as chair of the commission and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach was its vice chair and day-to-day administrator.
Fish v. Kobach was a 2018 bench trial in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas in which five Kansas residents and the League of Women Voters contested the legality of the Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC) requirement of the Kansas Secure and Fair Elections (SAFE) Act, which was enacted in 2011 and took effect in 2013.
A general election was held in the state of Kansas on November 6, 2018. Primary elections were held on August 7, 2018.
The 2022 Kansas Attorney General election took place on November 8, 2022, to elect the Attorney General of Kansas. Incumbent Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt announced he would retire to run for governor. The Republican nominee was former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and the Democratic nominee was former police officer, prosecutor, and state securities regulator, Chris Mann. Kobach narrowly won, taking 50.80% of the general election vote to Mann's 49.20%.
