Sherman Smith

speaker

1,886 appearances 17 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 21 Sep

Sherman Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.

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Kansas Reflector Podcast · Kansas Reflector staff recap 2026 legislative session · 6 Apr 2026 podcast

And I think the starting point for understanding this is that the chairman of the House Elections Committee, Representative Pat Proctor, a Republican from Leavenworth, is also running for Secretary of State, the job to oversee elections.

And so there are a couple of reasons why I follow this.

One is that these

Efforts to kind of make it harder to vote, I think, are central to how our democracy works.

The other thing is that the committees were just so entertaining because the proposals that he was putting forward were wildly partisan, sometimes had no supporters at all other than himself.

He had to smack his gavel down repeatedly throughout some of these hearings as Democrats complained.

It reached a boiling point late in the session when a bunch of Democrats accused him of being racist and walked out, or at least of making racist remarks.

specific.

um you know there's a testimony from out-of-state groups that was wildly dishonest um so that was the setting for where all a lot of these bills were were coming from uh what ended up with uh were you know a couple of bundles of bills um in a separate bill that um you know combined uh the executive director for the american civil liberties union of kansas micah kubik said

This is an effort at death by 1,000 cuts to Kansans' right to vote.

This includes legislation that would, it says, for instance, if a ACLU lawsuit that is challenging the signature verification law in Kansas, where you mail in a ballot and then

this entirely unscientific process of trying to see with an untrained eye if the signature on that ballot matches a signature on file, and if it doesn't, you throw the ballot out.

The ACLU is challenging that law.

The new law says if the ACLU prevails in striking that down, the state will repeal mail ballots in their entirety.

There's another provision that would require any challenge to an election lawsuit to be filed in Shawnee County.

This is happening because there was a challenge filed in Douglas County last year to a law, and they're worried about maybe having a more Democrat favorable judge over there ruling in a way they don't like.

So they want everybody to go through Shawnee County where there's a former Governor Brownback appointee who is more typically aligned with conservative causes.

There's a provision that would basically have a mass purge of voter rolls, ostensibly you're looking for people who have died or moved or that sort of thing, a normal cleanup of voter rolls, except there's a fear that this is gonna be so aggressive that they're gonna end up purging a lot of people who are actually legal, lawful voters who should not be taken off the voter rolls.

There's a provision that would restrict websites that help people register to vote.

There's a...

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