Conspiracies hinder GOP’s efforts in Kansas to cut the time for returning mail ballots

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A repeating of baseless election conspiracy theories in the Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature appears to have scuttled GOP lawmakers’ efforts this year to shorten the time that voters have to return mail ballots.

The state Senate was set to take a final vote Tuesday on a bill that would eliminate the three extra days after polls close for voters to get mail ballots back to their local election offices. Many Republicans argue that the so-called grace period undermines confidence in the state’s election results, though there’s no evidence of significant problems from the policy.

During a debate Monday, GOP senators rewrote the bill so that it also would ban remote ballot drop boxes — and, starting next year, bar election officials from using machines to count ballots. Ballot drop boxes and tabulating machines have been targets across the U.S. as conspiracy theories have circulated widely within the GOP and former President Donald Trump has promoted the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

The Senate’s approval of the bill would send it to the House, but the bans on vote-tabulating machines and remote ballot drop boxes all but doom it there. Ending the grace period for mail ballots already was an iffy proposition because Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly opposes the idea, and GOP leaders didn’t have the two-thirds majority necessary to override her veto of a similar bill last year.

Some Republicans had hoped they could pass a narrow bill this year and keep the Legislature’s GOP supermajorities together to override a certain Kelly veto.

“This isn’t a vote that’s going to secure our election,” Senate President Ty Masterson, a Wichita-area Republican, said Monday, arguing against the