TOPEKA — For two and half years, Davis Hammet has felt gaslighted by the state.
Now, he said, a decision made Friday by the Kansas Supreme Court has vindicated his claims that a 2021 voting law based on “the big lie” poses a threat to advocacy groups like his. Hammet is the founder and executive director of Loud Light.
“Telling us that we have no reason to be afraid, that we’re crazy, that there’s no threat of (registering voters),” Hammet said. “And today in an opinion issued unanimously by the Supreme Court and written by the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court, they said, ‘You’re not crazy. There is a very real fear of you facing felony charges for going out and (registering voters).’ ”
Hammet has been part of ongoing litigation over the election law. The challenged law made it a felony to have “the appearance of being an election official” or behave in ways that would “cause another person to believe a person engaging in such conduct is an election official.”
Hammet said Loud Light, under fear of felony charges, hasn’t registered voters since 2020, before the law went into effect. He estimated the group had been able to sign up almost 10,000 Kansans to vote at that time. Hammet said the group had probably missed out on registering thousands of voters in the years since, but said the total impact has been incalculable.
“In 2020, we were sort of running at full force. And then we had to stop all this,” Hammet said.
The law in question was first passed by the Republican-dominated Legislature in response to election fraud concerns, though there is no evidence of voter fraud in the state. Other portions of the law stipulate election officials have to evaluate advance ballots by matching signatures on file with the county with signatures on ballot envelope and limits the number of advance ballots an individual can gather for delivery to an election office to 10.
The League of Women Voters of Kansas, Loud Light, Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, and the Topeka Independent Living Resource Center filed their lawsuit against Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Attorney General Kris Kobach, but a Shawnee County District Court judge dismissed the lawsuit.
Among other arguments, the groups said the law had a significant chilling effect on their operations because at times observers believed they were election officials even though they always identify themselves as private citizens.
A three-judge panel of the Kansas Court of Appeals later reversed the decision, declaring voting a foundational constitutional right.
“It’s unfortunate that the district court didn’t reach this point because we’re two and a half years into suspending voter registration, through multiple elections,” Hammet said. “While we’re excited about the victory, we also can’t wait for a resolution on this so that we can get back to safely registering voters.”
Kansas Supreme Court justices on Friday ruled voting rights advocacy groups have the right to challenge the law, reversing the lower-court decision. Justice Caleb Stegall wrote in the court’s opinion about voting rights as a form of free speech, a classification that offers strong constitutional protections.
“Speech — that is, human communication — is a two-way street. But sometimes a listener may mistake the meaning intended by the speaker. … Despite these “problems” with speech, however, it remains the cornerstone of our free society and undoubtedly an essential, fundamental principle of American government,” Stegall wrote.
“We are cognizant — and wary — of recent government efforts to expand the scope of fraudulent speech to include speech the government, in its judgment, determines is simply false or misleading in some fashion,” Stegall wrote.
