Kansas election office declined gender-marker enforcement

Officials reject enforcement request

Kansas election officials declined to police gender markers on voter records after a Kansas Republican Party officer questioned the registration of a transgender Democrat running for a state House seat.

Roger Lomshek, the state party’s treasurer, called the Secretary of State’s Office in July about Avery Rowland of Girard. State Elections Director Bryan Caskey wrote in a July 6 email that Lomshek believed Senate Bill 244 applied to voter registration and that he disagreed with that interpretation.

Clay Barker, the office’s general counsel, reached a narrower conclusion. His legal analysis said voter registration forms and declarations for precinct committee positions must list a person’s sex assigned at birth, but election officials are not responsible for enforcing that rule. State officials also said gender designations do not affect voter registration or candidate filings.

Analysis exposed through flawed redaction

American Oversight obtained the emails through a public-records request and shared them with Kansas Reflector. Barker attempted to conceal his analysis with a black box in a PDF, but the box could be removed to reveal the text.

The Washington-based watchdog requested implementation records from the Secretary of State’s Office, the Kansas Department of Revenue and the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. At that point, only the Secretary of State’s Office had complied.

What Senate Bill 244 does

Senate Bill 244 requires gender markers on government records and bathroom use to correspond with a person’s sex assigned at birth. It allows fines, jail time and civil lawsuits involving bathroom use that does not follow that standard.

The law also invalidated hundreds of driver’s licenses issued to people who had changed their gender markers. The internal election-office analysis shows the law reaches voter forms while placing no enforcement duty on election officers.