The Republican secretaries of state for Kansas and Missouri signed a memorandum of understanding to exchange voter registration information in a bid to identify people who failed to cancel registrations after moving from one state to the other.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins said the partnership would enhance voter roll maintenance by “securely” sharing personal details on 1.87 million registered voters in Kansas and 4.13 million registered voters in Missouri.
Two organizations dedicated to advancing voter rights expressed skepticism the two-state agreement would do much to strengthen election security.
Neither secretary of state offered an estimate of the number of people in Kansas and Missouri who might have active registrations in a state where they used to reside.
“We can reduce duplicate registrations, created when residents move across the state line, by updating voter registration records timely and as allowed by law,” said Schwab, a candidate for the 2026 GOP nomination for governor in Kansas.
Hoskins said Missouri engaged in rigorous voter registration maintenance in accordance with state and federal law, but the deal “allows us to improve accuracy even further.”
He said the risk of duplicate registrations was real because thousands of Missourians and Kansans relocated each year across the state line in Kansas City metropolitan counties.
“This partnership is good government, plain and simple,” Hoskins said. “When voters move, their information should follow them and our local election officials deserve every available tool to keep the rolls clean, current and transparent.”
Esmie Tseng, spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said the organization’s concerns with the Missouri-Kansas arrangement were comparable to those shared in September when Schwab announced a voter registration collaboration between Kansas and Texas. She said both states must carefully guard personal information, and the states ought to proceed with the understanding that databases could be flawed.
“It should not be used as a way of simply scaring people about election integrity,” Tseng said.
Some states — but not Kansas — striving to upgrade election security in the past decade turned to the Electronic Registration Information Center. ERIC an organization of member states worked to collate motor vehicle department data, Social Security Administration death reports, address information from the U.S. Postal Service and state voter registration records to search for possible illegal voting.
Schwab’s predecessors as Kansas secretary of state operated the now-defunct Crosscheck program that promised to improve accuracy of state voter registration rolls. A lawsuit was filed challenging Crosscheck’s security shortcomings and a high rate of false positives. Settlement of the lawsuit in 2019 led to shelving of Crosscheck.
“Given the history of voter data mismanagement and its negative impact on Kansans, our big question is: How is this better than ERIC and different from Crosscheck?” said Melissa Stiehler, advocacy director for Loud Light, a Kansas organization focused on civil and voting rights.
Whitney Tempel, director of communications for Schwab, said all data sharing relevant to maintaining accurate voter rolls would be conducted in accordance with mandates of state or federal law.
She said the Kansas agreements with Missouri and Texas were part of a trend in which states proactively sought to update voter rolls through direct cooperation with other states.
“This is part of a national surge in one-to-one state agreements as opposed to multistate groups,” Tempel said. “This is one more tool for voter roll maintenance.”
Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said Kansas and Missouri were part of a growing trend among states that voluntarily partnered on data-sharing projects to streamline work on election security.
In early 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice requested states turn over voter registration lists as part of a national inquiry into potential voter fraud. The Justice Department said the goal was to guarantee compliance with federal laws. DOJ subsequently revealed information was shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for inclusion in the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
On Tuesday, election officials in 10 states sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and DOJ asking for clarification of statements about uses for voter registration data by the administration of President Donald Trump. DOJ filed lawsuits against eight states for declining to comply with demands for information, which included driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
In response, the Kansas secretary of state praised the federal SAVE database. Schwab committed to providing DOJ with publicly available voter information.
This story was originally published by the Kansas Reflector.
