Kansas may not require people registering to vote to provide documents proving their citizenship, a federal appeals court has ruled, striking down one of the most prominent Republican efforts to prove assertions of widespread election cheating.
The law was enacted in 2013 at the behest of Kris Kobach, the polarizing GOP figure who was then the state's top elections official and went on to chair President Trump' s commission to investigate voter fraud, which disbanded after coming up nearly empty.
Wednesday's ruling could bolster the prospects for other lawsuits by progressive groups and the Democrats. They are challenging election laws in more than a dozen states, many of them 2020 battlegrounds, arguing many rules were designed by conservative legislators to suppress the votes of racial minorities, college students and other reliably Democratic voters on the pretext of outsmarting an army of fraudsters that doesn't actually exist.
"Kansas wasn't able to muster evidence that the law in question here was necessary to prevent voter fraud, and I think that broader principle could have reverberations beyond the specific context of this case in a wide range of disputes over voting access between now and November," said Dale Ho, the American Civil Liberties Union's top voting rights lawyer.
Top GOP officials in Kansas said they may ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision, in which the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded the statute violated the Constitution's equal protection guarantee and the federal law regulating voter registration.
In the past two decades, the court said, 67 noncitizens at most registered or tried to register in Kansas — concluding that "incredibly slight evidence" of misbehavior was "statistically indistinguishable from zero" and did not justify preventing more than 31,000 applicants from registering, disenfranchising them during the five years the law was being enforced. (It has been blocked since 2018 because of the litigation.)
The state's interest in preventing such minimal fraud, the three-judge panel unanimously concluded, does "not justify the burden imposed on the right to vote."
The Kansas law is unique in requiring people to show a physical document such as a birth certificate or passport when applying to register. The state argued that is not too much of a burden and would assure the integrity of the voter rolls.
Mississippi is the only other state requiring would-be voters to similarly prove their citizenship, and that law only applies to naturalized Americans. It is being challenged in a separate federal lawsuit.
Kobach derided the decision as the "essence of judicial activism" and urged an appeal by his successor as secretary of state, Scott Schwab. He and Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a fellow Republican, said they were considering doing so.
The Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, has no say in the matter but urged them to give up. "If we have a problem with voting in the state of Kansas and across the country, it is that not enough people exercise their right," she said in a statement. "So I think eliminating any barriers to voting is a good thing."
Kobach, who was upset by Kelly in a bid for governor in 2018, is now seeking the state's open Senate seat in a competitive Republican primary.
"Make no mistake — this is a huge victory," said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of "Election Meltdown," a sharp critique of the American electoral system.
The case produced "the most important voting trial of the 21st century so far because it was the chance for those like Kobach who claim that voter fraud is a major problem in the United States to prove that in a court of law under the rules of evidence, "The proof was woefully inadequate."
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain. 
