Researcher questions Douglas County clerk’s ties to voter registration nonprofit

Douglas County’s election site sends voters to KSVotes.org, even though the nonprofit says it is “not a service of the Kansas Secretary of State or any election official.” That arrangement has raised questions about whether the county has enough guardrails when its top election official, Jamie Shew, is also tied to a voter-registration tool built outside government.

KSVotes.org describes itself as a 501(c)(3) non-partisan nonprofit and says it was built in partnership with Loud Light and GPS Impact. Douglas County, though, has treated the site as one of its registration paths, telling voters they can register through KSVotes.org or by paper application submitted to the Douglas County Election Office. The county’s own election page also points voters to an elections dashboard and register-to-vote page, underscoring that it is trying to steer residents online while still operating inside state election rules.

Shew has been Douglas County clerk and county election officer since 2004 and is serving his sixth term. In May 2026, he was named chair of a federal advisory elections board, becoming the first Kansan to hold that role. That national profile gives extra weight to the question now facing Lawrence and the rest of Douglas County: how far can a county election office lean on a nonprofit intermediary before the line between public administration and outside advocacy starts to blur?

Kansas already sets some guardrails. Kansas Secretary of State materials say voter registration can be done online or by paper, county election officers receive training on compliance with federal and state election laws, and registration books close 21 days before an election. Those rules do not resolve the larger debate over nonprofit-based registration tools, especially as House Bill 2437 took effect on July 1, 2026, and the ACLU of Kansas and League of Women Voters of Kansas warned Secretary of State Scott Schwab that the law may conflict with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

The dispute lands in a county that has already seen ballot-management controversy. In November 2024, Douglas County said it could not count 300 ballots from voters registered in other counties, a larger number than in previous elections. A later court filing said the county rejected more than 200 ballots in the August 6, 2024 primary because they arrived after the grace period even though they had been postmarked in July.

Kansas election offices have also been under strain. Nearly one-third of election officials had left since 2020 amid harassment and conspiracy theories, and Shew was among the officials publicly discussing that pressure in 2023. Against that backdrop, Douglas County’s reliance on KSVotes.org is now being tested not just as a convenience for voters, but as a matter of oversight, trust and how much distance local government keeps from outside registration groups.