By The Epoch Times | Created at 2026-10-16 12:21:35 | Updated at 2026-10-16 12:57:32
37 minutes ago
Kansas can prohibit third parties from prefilling portions of absentee ballot applications, a federal appeals court ruled on Oct. 14.
“Because the Prohibition was enacted without an improper purpose, we apply intermediate scrutiny and find the Prohibition constitutional,” Circuit Judge Timothy Tymkovich wrote for a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.
Kansas lawmakers approved the law containing the prohibition in 2021, overriding the state governor’s veto. Officials said the law was aimed at reducing voter confusion and reducing the workload for election offices.
Under the law, organizations and individuals sending absentee ballot applications cannot complete any portion of the applications before mailing them to voters.
Several organizations sued, alleging the law illegally chilled their political speech and activity.
They wrote in a 2021 complaint that the law “prohibits Plaintiffs from employing their most effective means of persuading voters to engage in the democratic process: mailing advance mail ballot applications to registered Kansas voters, complete with a pre-addressed return envelope, and personalizing those applications by prefilling the individual’s name and address information.”
U.S. District Judge Kathryn Vratil blocked the provision, concluding the organizations were likely to succeed in their case. She applied the test of strict scrutiny, the most stringent analysis, which required officials to show the restrictions were narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest, and said they did not.
The 10th Circuit in 2024 said that Vratil should have applied intermediate scrutiny, a looser threshold, because the threat to free speech posed by the law “is sufficiently small that (absent evidence that it was enacted for an improper purpose or justification) adequate protection is provided by intermediate scrutiny.” It remanded the case to the district court for reconsideration.
An improper purpose can include a government acting to suppress free expression.
Vratil then determined that the legislature seemed to approve the law “because of disagreement with speech which advocates voting by mail” and that prohibiting partially prefilled applications did not address the goals state officials outlined, including reducing voter confusion. Legislators enacted the ban “to suppress speech which advocates voting by mail,” she said.
That enabled her to apply strict scrutiny again, and to again block the statute. She also said that even under intermediate scrutiny, the law would be blocked.
The 10th Circuit panel said Wednesday that the judge’s determination of an improper purpose was erroneous.
“The district court found an improper purpose without evidence from the Prohibition’s justifications, text, or legislative history; it instead inferred an improper purpose from the national political debate on mail-in voting,” Tymkovich wrote.
The state’s motives for enacting the law, including minimizing voter confusion, are each legitimate interests and do not point to restricting the viewpoint of the organizations that sued, according to the ruling.
“None of the other provisions of H.B. 2332 reveal an improper motivation that we might impute onto the State’s enactment of the Prohibition,” Tymkovich also said, including a now-blocked provision that prohibited people from outside the state from sending absentee voting applications to Kansas residents.
The Voter Participation Center, one of the organizations that sued, said in a statement: “While we are disappointed with this reversal, the fight to protect Kansas voters is not over. We are reviewing [the] ruling and assessing our legal options.”
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
