After Kobach, candidates stress competence

There’s a common thread among the campaigns of several men aspiring to replace Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — promises of administrative competence.

So says Emporia State political scientist Michael Smith. It jumped out at him as he perused some of their websites.

“To me,” he said, it “has sort of a subtext, that that has not been Kobach’s focus.”

Take Olathe Republican Scott Schwab’s campaign ad. In a video scored with soothing piano music, Schwab rattles off a list of changes to Kansas election law that Kobach and state lawmakers like himself ushered in over the past several years.

“I would say it’s time now to just breathe,” the candidate tells viewers. “Take what we’ve got and let’s execute it at a high level. That way when you get the results after that primary or general election, you trust it.”

Schwab is one of six men who have stepped forward to fill Kobach’s shoes in an office that the secretary transformed from a relatively mundane post into a bully pulpit.

In an interview, Schwab said he’s offering a change in leadership style — a focus on supporting county election clerks and making sure their practices for counting ballots are consistent.

Under Kobach, he said, there were distractions. The result? Limited availability to those clerks.

“You know, Kris is running for governor,” said Schwab, a state lawmaker with a key leadership position in the House. “He’s been plagued by a lot of lawsuits. And he was very involved early on with the Trump administration.”

A higher office

Secretary of state has traditionally been more of an administrative job in Kansas. The office maintains databases and records on everything from voter registration to business startups.

Enter Kobach — a man with loud but unsubstantiated claims about rampant illegal voting, and national ambitions for his tough-on-immigration agenda. He broke the mold.

“Kobach has obviously been extremely controversial and ideological in how he has run the office,” University of Kansas political scientist Patrick Miller said. “That has highlighted the power and importance of this office.”

Since taking office in 2011, the Topeka native from a small Midwestern state has quite possibly become the country’s best known state-level secretary of state.

Within Kansas, he got his state to enact the country’s tightest voter registration requirements and bestow prosecutorial powers that no other other secretary of state had.