Rumor and Reality
The 2026 Senate election in Kansas won't be canceled. But other threats to election integrity are real.
Here’s how the newest rumor about Kansas elections goes: A 2025 state law says that a U.S. Senate vacancy that occurs after May 1 in an even-numbered year won’t be permanently filled for two years. In other words, if Senator Roger Marshall resigns before Election Day, the 2026 Senate election can’t happen.1 The idea first appeared in a Kansas Reflector article, but it’s spreading further in syndication, and even further among concerned voters.
First, the good news. That’s not how U.S. Senate elections work.
How we elect U.S. senators
For the first 125 years of the republic, ordinary voters didn’t choose senators at all. State legislatures did. That changed in 1913, with the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which established direct election of senators.2
What has never changed is the length of each senator’s term in office. Senators serve for six years, and their terms are staggered.3 A third of the Senate is up for election in any given even-year election.4 Roger Marshall’s seat is in Class II (up for election in 2026), has always been in Class II, and will always be in Class II. Nothing the Kansas legislature does can change that.
The Kansas law that’s being cited in these discussions is badly written and reduces the governor’s traditional authority over Senate vacancies.5 It’s not a good law. But even if the law clearly claimed the authority rumormongers allege that it claims, it couldn’t overrule federal law or the U.S. Constitution. No state law can do that.6 The only thing the Kansas legislature has the power to do is decide how a vacancy within a term is filled. It has no power to extend the term itself.
That’s the good news. Now for the bad news.
There are real threats to Kansas elections
I suspect we tend to believe rumors like this because we intuit that the threat to our democracy is real. But, too often, we look for a very real threat in all the wrong places.
The rumors that Marshall will resign and that the 2026 election will be canceled aren’t worth your energy.
Other things are.
First, follow your ballot from your mailbox to the election office.
For many years, an advance ballot had to reach the county election office by the time the polls closed on Election Day. That changed in 2017, when the legislature added a three-day grace period allowing mail-in ballots postmarked before the close of polls to be counted. The 2017 law passed by an almost unanimous vote (only one member of the House voted no).7
But by 2025, the Republican Party decided that ballot access for absentee voters wasn’t such a good thing after all, and they scrapped the grace period (over the governor’s veto).8
In 2026, if your ballot doesn’t arrive by 7 p.m. on Election Day, it will be thrown out — no matter how slow the post office is that week.
In 2024, 137,000 Kansans voted by mail,9 so this change could affect a lot of voters.
Then see what the Post Office does with it.
The federal government is also targeting mail-in ballots.
In March, the president signed an executive order directing the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on a federally approved list.10 In May, the Postal Service proposed a rule that would entirely withhold ballot delivery in states that refuse to surrender their voter rolls to the federal government.11
Twenty-three states are suing to stop the executive order, but Kansas isn’t one of them.12 Instead, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach has taken the federal government’s side in the dispute.13
Most important of all, look at what’s on your ballot.
The changes and threats I’ve written about so far are the short game — already in effect, and at play in 2026 to suppress votes.
But there’s also a long game.
Your August 4 primary ballot will ask you to vote on a constitutional amendment that would replace the current system of vetting Kansas Supreme Court justices with partisan elections (and all the fund-raising elections require).14
Do we really want to give big-money donors the power to influence the makeup of our Supreme Court?
That’s the sort of influence a measure like this inevitably invites, even as it pretends to be pro-democracy. The fact that this is on the ballot in the lower-turnout August primary rather than the November general election is itself a choice that gives the lie to any pretense of supporting true democracy.
What you can do
First, don’t panic about Marshall’s Senate seat and rumors of a canceled election. If that gambit comes, you’ll hear about it, it will wind up in court, and it will almost certainly fail.
Save your energy for the less exciting but very real tactics that are already being used. And respond to them.
Check your voter registration before the July 14 registration deadline, and help someone else check theirs. If you’re not registered, you can register online.
If you vote by mail, vote early enough that a slow mail truck can’t disqualify you.
Pay attention to who you’re voting for. The attorney general is one official who decides whether the state of Kansas will defend your right to vote or narrow it. The incumbent, Kris Kobach, has taken the side of the federal government in the mail-in-ballot fight. And he’s on the ballot in 2026. His opponent, Chris Mann (no relation to Congressman Tracey Mann), is a former police officer and prosecutor.15
Vote no on the August constitutional amendment (to help keep the Kansas Supreme Court professional and independent in the long run).
The dramatic threats to democracy are relatively easy to defeat.
It’s the boring, bureaucratic ones that slip through while we’re looking the other way.
In 2026, we need to pay attention to the little things — the deadlines, the mail carriers, the seemingly harmless constitutional amendments.
Kansas Senate Bill 105 (2025). The law strips the governor of the longstanding power to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy at her own discretion: it requires her to choose from three names supplied by a Republican-controlled legislative committee and limits the appointment to the departing senator’s party. It also contains the disputed clause: “If the vacancy occurs on or after May 1 in an even-numbered year, then such vacancy shall be filled by election at the election of representatives in congress held two years following the year in which such vacancy occurs.”
“Supremacy Clause,” Wikipedia. Here, federal law affirmatively requires the 2026 election: 2 U.S.C. § 1 provides that a senator “shall be elected by the people” at the regular election just before a given term expires. Barry Grissom, a former U.S. Attorney for Kansas, called it “not a close or debatable question,” explaining that any application of state law moving Marshall’s seat off its Class II cycle “would be unconstitutional and without legal effect” (quoted in the Kansas Reflector, June 19, 2026). And the Election Law Blog — run by leading election-law scholars — put it in a single sentence: “A State cannot extend the term of a U.S. Senator.”
Over 137,000 Kansans cast a ballot by mail in the 2024 general election — Democracy Docket case tracker for the SB 4 challenge, Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice v. Schwab.
The proposed postal rule and its delivery-withholding mechanism: CNN, June 10, 2026; Votebeat, May 29, 2026.
“Kobach joins coalition to defend executive order on election integrity,” Kansas Attorney General news release, April 22, 2026. Kobach’s office frames the multistate challenge as an effort to “derail an opportunity for states like Kansas to work alongside the federal government.”
Ballotpedia; Wikipedia (the amendment “would create partisan elections and six-year terms for justices”).