The signal

Kansas will count a mailed ballot in the November 3 general election if it is postmarked by Election Day and arrives by the last mail delivery on the third day after. A 2025 law, SB 4, would have required every mailed ballot to arrive by Election Day. A Douglas County judge blocked it on July 16, 2026, and on October 2 the Kansas Court of Appeals refused to lift that block for November. On October 14 Kansas began mailing advance ballots to voters who requested them; ballots for military and overseas voters had to go out by September 19. Missouri has no such window for an ordinary absentee ballot: it counts only if it is in by the close of polls. Missouri law sets a separate rule for military and overseas ballots.

The word

“Grace period.” It is what the district court calls the rule, and it sounds like a courtesy, something the state extends and can take back.

The rule dates to 2017. Before that, the Court of Appeals writes, “For about 40 years, K.S.A. 25-1132 required that advance-voting ballots must be received by a county election office by Election Day to be counted.” Then, the district court’s order records, the Legislature replaced the strict Election Day receipt deadline “with a three-day grace period, to allow for the counting of ballots received after Election Day if they were postmarked on or before and received within three days of the election.” The order puts the vote at 123–1, and records that the grace period “was enacted to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised by mail delays beyond their control.”

A ballot counted in those three days was postmarked on time.

What it actually does

SB 4, codified at K.S.A. 25-1132(b), would have ended the three days and required every mailed ballot to be received by Election Day, however early it was mailed.

On July 16, 2026, Judge Carl Folsom III of the Douglas County District Court, in Kansas Appleseed Center for Law and Justice v. Schwab (No. DG-2025-CV-000206), granted a temporary injunction. SB 4 is “TEMPORARILY ENJOINED from taking effect pending further order of this Court,” and “prior law governing the receipt of advance ballots sent by mail before SB 4 remains in effect.” Under that prior law, as the order recites it, ballots that are “postmarked or are otherwise indicated by the United States Postal Service to have been mailed on or before the close of the polls” count if they arrive by “the last delivery of mail by the United States Postal Service on the third day following the date of the election.” For November 3, that is Friday, November 6.

The Secretary of State appealed. In the Court of Appeals’ summary, he argues, among other things, that the district court “misapplied Kansas constitutional law, improperly sustained a facial challenge to a generally applicable ballot-receipt deadline, and entered relief broader than Kansas law permits.” The district court wrote that “The Secretary provided no evidence relevant to this motion or these issues.” On October 2, 2026, the Kansas Court of Appeals (No. 130,839) denied his renewed motion to stay the injunction for the general election: “If the injunction remains in place through the November election, the State will temporarily continue administering the ballot-receipt rule that has existed since 2017 and that governed the August 2026 primary.” The court added that a Kansas voter “may reasonably rely on the temporary injunction” when mailing an advance ballot by Election Day.

The Court of Appeals also wrote that “The Secretary correctly observes that the State has an important interest in administering elections under laws enacted by the legislature.” The case is not over. The court wrote that “Our decision today does not forecast the ultimate disposition of the appeal,” and that it “will contact the parties about setting a date for oral arguments.” A later order could change the rule before November 3.

Johnson County’s own advance-voting page, read on October 13, still says the Secretary “has filed a motion” to stay the decision, does not mention the October 2 denial, and says: “Because of the legal uncertainty while the matter is pending on appeal, voters are urged to return their ballots by the close of the polls on Election Day.”

Who it hit

Every Kansas voter who mails an advance ballot for November 3. That includes the Kansas side of the Kansas City metro. Wyandotte and Johnson counties are home to 62,480 of the 158,710 Kansans the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey counts as Black or African American alone, about two in five. That counts where they live; it is not a finding of whom the rule falls on hardest.

By rate, the three days mattered most in rural counties. The district court’s order finds, citing the plaintiffs’ expert, that “the more rural a county, the greater the grace period rate in the 2024 general elections,” with Kansas’s most rural counties seeing more than double the rate of the most urban counties. Statewide, it puts the average rate of ballots arriving in the grace period at 1.4% and counts 2,110 such ballots in the 2024 general election.

Johnson County has its own number. On March 3, 2026, in elections “held after SB 4 went into effect,” three jurisdictions in Johnson County voted by mail on local ballot issues. Of approximately 30,000 ballots, the order records, “1,008 were rejected for arriving after Election Day. Thus, approximately 1-in-30 ballots were discounted.” The court took that evidence over the Secretary’s objection and said it corroborates the request but “is not dispositive of the request.” The order gives no breakdown of those ballots by race.

The order says Kansans who live away from their county of registration, such as college students, are “more likely to be disenfranchised by SB 4” because they must rely on mail and are farther from their county election office. It says other groups “will be particularly and disparately harmed by SB 4,” for instance seniors and Kansans with disabilities, who “often have no other feasible and safe option to vote.”

The rule stops at the state line. Kansas City, Missouri and the rest of Jackson County vote under Missouri law, where “no votes on any absentee ballot received by an election authority after the time fixed by law for the closing of the polls on election day shall be counted,” except as section 115.920 provides.