GUEST COLUMN, Pat Proctor, Chariman, Kansas House Elections Committee
On March 25, 2025, President Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” marking a pivotal moment in the ongoing debate over election security. And, not surprisingly, nearly as soon as he signed the order, Democrats sued to stop him from implementing it.
In addition to serving the people of Kansas as the Chairman of their House Committee on Elections, this year, I became a member of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Board of Advisors. At the Board’s annual meeting last month, I joined fellow conservatives in pushing the EAC to implement the measures in President Trump’s executive order on voting machine standards and proof of citizenship. I would like to take a moment to talk about the measures in this Executive Order and why I feel so strongly about making sure they are implemented.
Designed to eliminate vulnerabilities in the voting process, the President’s Executive Order on Elections introduces stringent reforms addressing concerns about voter fraud, non-citizen voting, and inconsistent state regulations. Congress should now back this blueprint with real dollars, giving election offices the resources they need to put every safeguard into practice. Among its key provisions, the order requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration, enforces a uniform Election Day deadline for ballot receipt, and revises standards for voting machines. While supporters hail the initiative as a necessary safeguard, opponents are fighting in court to block it.
The order establishes stricter ballot receipt deadlines by conditioning federal election funding on state compliance with a rule requiring all ballots to be received by Election Day. This measure specifically targets states that allow late-arriving mail-in ballots, aiming to create a standardized approach to ballot submission deadlines. Coincidentally, the same day this order was issued, we in the Kansas House overrode Governor Kelly’s veto of Senate Bill 4, a bill I carried and passed to repeal Kansas’ so-called “three-day grace period” and make Election Day once again Election Day.
A central focus of the order is tightening voter registration requirements to prevent non-citizen voting. The EAC is directed to update the national mail voter registration form, to require government-issued proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate. Moreover, to strengthen verification efforts, federal agencies—particularly the Department of Homeland Security—must share their databases with states to confirm voter eligibility. Additionally, the US Attorney General is tasked with prioritizing prosecutions related to non-citizen voting.
In Kansas, we didn’t wait for the federal government to fix the problem of non-citizen voting. This year, I successfully carried a constitutional amendment to ensure only US citizens are allowed to vote here in Kansas and as well as a bill to require the DMV to cooperate with the Secretary of State’s office in finding and removing non-citizens from our voter rolls.
There is a crisis of voter confidence in this state and this nation. For the last three years, as Chairman of the House Elections Committee, I have been fighting to restore confidence in our elections here in Kansas by increasing transparency, combating non-citizen voting and ballot-harvesting, and cleaning up our voter rolls. The measures in President Trump’s Executive Order are a critical step to achieving this goal and they need to be implemented.
U.S. Army Col. (Ret.) Pat Proctor is a Kansas State Representative, Chairman of the House Elections Committee, an EAC Board advisor, assistant professor of Homeland Security at Wichita State University, and a candidate for Kansas Secretary of State.
And how many people have ever been discovered, prosecuted and convicted of voter fraud in Kansas, both citizens and non?
Certainly, if there are so many as to be worth spending tax prayers money on this effort there must be many?