Sisyphus in Kansas: Republican’s efforts to restore confidence in voting system appear ill-fated

Kansas Rep. Pat Proctor, R-Leavenworth, is running in the Republican primary for secretary of state. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

Kansas Rep. Pat Proctor, R-Leavenworth, is running for Kansas secretary of state with a stated focus of restoring confidence in elections. His ill-fated plan to achieve this goal recalls the struggle of the Greek mythological figure Sisyphus.

Sisyphus angered Zeus by betraying his trust and then by twice cheating the god of death, Thanatos. As punishment, Sisyphus was cursed to roll a boulder up a hill for eternity only for it to roll back down each time he neared the top.

While Sisyphus was cursed with an impossible task, Proctor seems to have designed one for himself.

Understanding why his efforts to restore voter confidence seem doomed to fail requires taking a look at where he is choosing to focus his attention and, crucially, what he chooses to ignore.

To fulfill his stated goal of restoring electoral confidence, Proctor seeks to curb noncitizen voting, eliminate ballot harvesting and improve the organization and transparency of the electoral process.

When I heard Proctor discuss these issues in December at Fort Hays State University, I found myself agreeing with several of the adjustments he proposed to the electoral system, such as being more fastidious about updating voting addresses when people move or regularly cleaning voter rolls.

However, I found it difficult to believe that these small clerical issues or obscure practices such as ballot harvesting could be responsible for declining electoral confidence. Even the largest problem according to Proctor — noncitizen voting — is actually a minor one.

Proctor informed the Hays audience that in 2024 they discovered 80 noncitizens on the Kansas voting roll and that 20 of them are believed to have voted in the last election.

Multiple studies show that noncitizen voting, and voter fraud are exceedingly rare in the United States, with public perceptions of these problems far outpacing their actual occurrence.

Restoring electoral confidence, then, is less about repairing a system than assuring people it actually works.

Proctor ignores a crucial factor: sustained propaganda efforts from outlets such Fox News, which promoted false claims about Dominion voting machines, and a president who, despite the absence of evidence, continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen and regularly alleges widespread fraud.

Fretting about clerical issues in the electoral system while ignoring the larger rhetorical problem coming from within Proctor’s own party is like stuffing a grenade into a retaining wall and then complaining about the effects of erosion.

Imagine Proctor is elected in 2026 and implements every one of his proposed reforms. A few careless tweets from the president about Democrats planning to steal an upcoming election or relitigating 2020 voter fraud claims could destroy whatever confidence Proctor had managed to restore among Kansas voters.

In other words, the boulder would be rolled back down to the bottom of the hill.

When I spoke to Proctor about this issue, he acknowledged the problem of rhetoric but excused President Donald Trump’s repeated claims about election fraud as a byproduct of an eccentric personality instead of treating them as a serious impediment to restoring voter confidence. He also urged me to look to at the president’s recent exective order on “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.”

I looked at the order and found that while some provisions made sense, it hardly compensated for the continuous flow of misinformation. If Smoky Bear used his free time to promote fireworks companies and regularly tossed his smoldering cigarette butts on the forest floor, you would probably wonder how serious he was about preventing forest fires.

The fact that Proctor would ignore such a crucial obstacle to restoring electoral confidence is bizarre given that he wrote an entire book about the problem of willful ignorance.

In “Lessons Unlearned: The U.S. Army’s Role in Creating the Forever Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Proctor argues that Army leaders “stubbornly insulated their organization from the lessons that might otherwise have been learned from the low-intensity conflicts of the 1990s.”

This willful ignorance, he argues, hindered the Army’s ability to win wars, resulting in the protracted conflicts we have seen in the Middle East over the past two decades.

This raises an obvious question. Why would a man who wrote an entire book about the absurdity of self-constructed problems and unwinnable battles decide to build the next stage of his political career around one?

One possibility is that he doesn’t really care about voter confidence. Like many other politicians, Proctor may simply have chosen a platform that seems credible in order to advance his political career.

Another option is one that Kansas Reflector and other news outlets have reported on extensively. That is, rather than being aimed at restoring voter confidence, Proctor’s “reforms” are intended to restrict voting access while creating conditions that favor GOP candidates.

In a recent release of the Proctor Election Report, Proctor justified his efforts to move local elections to even years by warning: “Odd-year elections elect Democrats.”

He helped pass legislation last year to end the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots and now is striving to reduce access to online voter registration. It is difficult to not see these moves as politically motivated given that — as Kansas Reflector reported earlier this month — “Democrats who use advance ballots outnumber Republicans by a 2-to-1 margin.”

Proctor could assuage concerns about his intentions by introducing legislation that punishes the blatant spread of election misinformation. At a minimum, he could publicly challenge baseless accusations of fraud from his GOP colleagues.

Until he does so, Kansas will continue to speculate about his motives, and the proverbial boulder of electoral confidence will never reach the top of the hill.

Sam Foglesong is a scholar of African Studies and a writer who lives in Hays. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.