Key Votes

This bill makes it a criminal misdemeanor for public employees to use any government resources — including work time — to communicate about constitutional amendments or ballot questions. It removes an existing legal safe harbor that allowed public workers to respond to citizen inquiries and share neutral information, leaving school communications staff, city clerks, and agency employees exposed to prosecution for routine job duties. The bill also imposes new restrictions on how local governments can inform voters about bond issues, making it harder for school districts and cities to explain construction bond proposals — threatening the publicly funded building projects that put trades workers on the job.

This bill requires any website used for voter registration to either have a .gov domain or get pre-approval from the Secretary of State, with violations carrying criminal misdemeanor charges. Unions and community organizations that run voter registration drives could be shut out of online registration if the Secretary of State denies or delays approval — and the bill includes no timeline, appeal process, or objective standards for those decisions. The result is a new layer of government gatekeeping over civic engagement tools that labor and allied organizations rely on to register working people to vote.

This constitutional amendment would abolish Kansas's merit-based system for selecting Supreme Court justices and replace it with partisan elections, while also allowing justices to raise campaign money and participate in party politics. The Kansas Supreme Court is the final word on workers' comp appeals, public employee bargaining rights, and wage enforcement — and partisan elections would open the door for corporate donors to spend unlimited money electing judges friendly to their interests. Labor opposes this measure because the court that decides whether injured workers get compensated and whether public employees can bargain should not be beholden to the biggest campaign contributors.