Each month, NCSL’s elections and redistricting team interviews a local election official or legislative election leader to highlight the work officials and legislators are doing to improve election policy and administration in the U.S. To see other installments in this series, visit Election Conversations.
Kansas Rep. Pat Proctor knows what it means to serve. A 30-year veteran of the U.S. Army who now chairs the House Committee on Elections, Proctor has experienced service in many contexts.
“In the Army, you’re serving every American you meet,” he says. “That’s pretty abstract.”
Things are more concrete in his hometown, Leavenworth, which includes a military base and a federal penitentiary. “Those folks don’t vote in elections that I run in, but the folks that do vote for me, I know them all. I understand who I am impacting when I vote in the Legislature.”
NCSL caught up with Proctor to talk about his journey to a committee leadership role and the bills the committee passed. He discussed the importance of working with state and local election administrators, his experience voting as a deployed military member, and his passion for his district and bringing people into the elections process.
How did you become chair of the Committee on Elections?
When I was first elected to the Legislature in 2020, I did not ask to be on the Elections Committee. I’m from a military and a prison community, so I asked to be on Corrections or Veterans and Military, but I was put on the Elections Committee, which felt strange to me. I thought about how I needed to learn something about elections, so I scheduled a meeting with the Kansas secretary of state’s elections team and spent the whole day with them going through everything about elections.
The day I visited the office was Jan. 6, 2021. During that meeting, my phone was blowing up with calls and texts, but I wasn’t going to interrupt the meeting because, how often do you get an opportunity to sit with all those experts? When I walked out of the meeting, I looked down at my phone and saw the news. I was just in the office learning everything there was to learn about elections, and Jan. 6 had been happening in D.C. It just really hit me all at once how important elections are. It is so important that voters have confidence that the results of our elections reflect their will.
When I came back for my second term as a more senior member, I knew without hesitation that I wanted to be the chairman of the committee. I wanted to create a platform where we could start to address this crisis of voter confidence and restore confidence in our elections.
How do you work with state and local election officials, and what have you learned from them?
Something I’ve learned from my participation with NCSL is how different elections are in every state. It’s been very valuable to hear from other election officers and legislators in other states about the uniqueness of their own election system. Here in Kansas, we have a bottom-up election system. The secretary of state is the chief election official, but every county runs their own elections.
I’ve done my best to visit as many counties as possible, and I’ve met with a lot of clerks and election commissioners to talk to them about the unique challenges and opportunities in their counties. It is really important that when we’re crafting legislation in Topeka to address election law statewide, that we are not unintentionally making life harder for election officers.
I also stay in communication with our state association of clerks and election officers so that when we’re drafting legislation, we are working in cooperation with them rather than springing it on them to possibly have to fix something down the road. I keep an open dialogue with the secretary of state’s office because they are steeped in elections 24/7 and they have a lot of insight that I find valuable.
Did you vote while you were deployed with the military, and what was that experience like?
I always voted, especially when I was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Many people who aren’t connected to the military in some way may not know that nonpartisanship and apolitical sentiments are part of the military’s DNA. There were so many people that I served with and had no idea what their politics were when we were in the Army.
Despite this norm, the military takes the responsibility to make sure that all service members have the opportunity to vote very seriously. Every unit has a voting assistance officer. As an additional duty, these officers are tasked with making sure that folks in the military know how to vote and that they have the tools they need to register and to get an absentee ballot. I got the opportunity to do that a couple times, and I took it very seriously. As military members we put our lives on the line to defend our Constitution, so it is important that military members get to be a part of the process. With UOCAVA (Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act), we’ve really afforded service members an extraordinary opportunity to vote.
What election policies did the committee hear this year?
This is the most prolific year the Elections Committee has had in a long time. We’ve had the opportunity to move a lot of things that have previously been stuck. We passed a bill that now requires all absentee ballots to be received by Election Day. Previously, we had a three-day grace period for postmarked ballots. The secretary of state’s office collected data from the 2024 election and found that many late ballots could not be counted because some rural counties’ post offices didn’t have time to postmark them. We now join 32 other states that require absentee ballots to be received by Election Day.
We also passed a bill that requires data sharing between the Department of Motor Vehicles and the secretary of state’s office to share information about noncitizens to ensure that noncitizens aren’t on voter registration rolls.
We’ve made some simple timeline reforms that help election officers. We had this weird law that required a public test of voting machines five days before Election Day, but we allow early voting 20 days before Election Day. So, this testing felt like it was only for show. Now, in addition to the logic and accuracy testing, the public testing takes place before early voting. We had a banner year in the Elections Committee, and I’m really proud of what we passed.
What is your favorite part of being a legislator?
I’d like to answer this question twice, as a legislator for Leavenworth, Fort Leavenworth and Kickapoo, Kan., and as the chairman of the Elections Committee.
As a representative serving my district, I know the people that I am serving, and it is such a rich, rewarding experience. I am so honored and humbled to have the opportunity to represent them.
As the chair of the Elections Committee, what keeps me working at it is bringing people back into the process. We have a crisis of voter confidence, and a lot of people have abandoned voting altogether because they don’t believe in it. I’ve worked hard to make the committee a platform for conversation. I hear a lot of bills that I have no intention of moving just to tee up conversations and bring people in from both sides of issues so that they have to have a calm conversation. Because what we’ve been doing since 2020 is a shouting match, and that’s not getting us anywhere. When we can have those really incredible conversations where people are challenged on their beliefs in a respectful way, that helps everybody understand the process better. You see the light bulb turn on, and then you have those after-committee-hearing conversations where people thank you for hearing them out and for forcing them to consider things they had never considered. It is just so incredibly rewarding, and I just wish there was a way to scale this up and do this as a country to bring people back to the process.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.