President Donald J. Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election did much to restore voter confidence across the country, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to stop working to improve election security.
Instead, these historic results represent an opportunity to seize the momentum and bring disillusioned voters back into the process. As the chairman of the Kansas House Committee on Elections, that is exactly what I have been working to do.
First and foremost, we need to increase transparency in the elections process. First, transparency means measures that assure the public that the results of the election reflect their will. In Kansas, we have acted to strengthen our paper ballot audit system. We’ve also acted to repeal the so-called “three-day grace period,” so that, as in 32 other states, Election Day is once again Election Day and vote counts don’t drag on for days after the election.
But, sometimes, transparency just means having a conversation. People with concerns about our elections process need to be listened to, not shouted down. That’s why I have made my committee room a platform where folks can bring their concerns and be heard, publicly.
Where their concerns are misplaced, they present an opportunity to educate the public. But where their concerns are valid, we need to act to address them.
One place where we’ve address those concerns is in combating non-citizen voting. Nowhere in the Kansas Constitution or in statute are non-citizens actually prohibited from voting. So we’ve put a ballot measure on the November 2026 ballot to enshrine in our state constitution the principle that only U.S. citizens can vote in Kansas.
And we’ve passed measures requiring that the DMV share the non-citizen data that it collects with the secretary of state’s office so they can scrub our voter rolls to find and remove non-citizens.
A key concern that we’ve addressed to restore confidence in our elections and bring disillusioned voters back into the process is cleaning up our voter rolls. In recent years we’ve given election officers new tools to remove inactive voters from their books. And this year we gave them the authority to use online obituaries from local mortuaries to remove deceased voters.
Our future efforts will be focused on creating interstate compacts with our neighbors to identify voters who have moved out of state and working with credit agencies to identify even more deceased voters.
Before I became a legislator I spent 25 years in the U.S. Army including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have seen what it looks like when citizens abandoned faith in elections and civil processes and pick up guns to settle their political disputes.
My oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, to protect our form of government and our way of life, didn’t end when I took off the uniform. We have got to bring our neighbors who have lost faith in elections and the sanctity of representative government back into the process if we are going to survive as a nation.
The results of the 2024 presidential election have presented us with an historic opportunity to do this — if we have the courage to seize that opportunity.
U.S. Army Col. (Ret.) Pat Proctor is a Kansas representative and chairman of the Kansas House Committee on Elections. He is also a member of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Board of Advisors and an assistant professor of Homeland Security at Wichita State University.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Election integrity efforts can appease disillusioned voters | Opinion
