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The ACLU of Kansas testified in January that such methods could lead to the disenfranchisement of people who are otherwise eligible to vote. In his testimony before the Kansas legislature, ACLU of Kansas director of policy and research Logan DeMond said that “voter inactivity must never be treated as evidence of ineligibility.” He warned that people facing housing instability, who live in rural areas with limited mail access and those who simply choose not to vote could get “swept into purge processes, especially when combined with unreliable address or database matching.” “These bills are part and parcel of the illegal and dangerous attempts nationally to subvert our democracy and to dismantle our fundamental constitutional protections against government overreach and state violence,” said ACLU of Kansas Executive Director Micah Kubic about the laws’s enactment.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas last month warned that the state’s legislature is attacking elections and voter rights “from a multitude of directions.” The group called HB 2587 a “shell bill,” noting that it was originally drafted for an unrelated purpose. And in fact, the bill’s title is: “Authorizing a licensed private psychiatric hospital to maintain a stock supply of emergency medication kits for pharmaceutical emergencies.” Micah Kubic, the ACLU of Kansas’s executive director, claimed in a press release last month that the state’s politicians were eroding “Kansans’ ability to vote by obstructing voter registration, shifting deadlines, restricting mail-in voting, sharing sensitive data, fabricating the issue of widespread fraud in Kansas elections, and assigning blame to noncitizens. Legislators have opted to do all this before key primary and general elections in Kansas, giving county clerks and voters virtually no chance to adapt to or even understand these changes.”

The ACLU of Kansas sharply criticized the measures, calling them an attack on voters’ rights ahead of the critical 2026 primary and general elections.

“This is an effort at death by a thousand cuts to Kansans' right to vote in one fell swoop. Politicians have grown impatient and hurried through a Frankensteined attack on the beginning, middle, and end of election administration and Kansans' ability to vote by obstructing voter registration, shifting deadlines, restricting mail-in voting, sharing sensitive data, fabricating the issue of widespread fraud in Kansas elections, and assigning blame to noncitizens.” — Micah Kubic, Executive Director, ACLU of Kansas

Micah Kubic, the executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, remembers the legal fights between Kobach and Johnson. He said Kansas has tried to create a system where voters need to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. The goal was to clean up voter rolls and make sure nobody was improperly casting ballots, something similar to what the federal government is trying now. It ended up with more than 30,000 people, or 12% of the total voter registration applications from 2013-2016, being blocked. That law was thrown out.

"It was tens of thousands of people in Kansas," Bonds, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas at the time, told USA TODAY. "Obviously, if you multiply that nationally, it could really deprive a bunch of people who are undoubtedly lawfully authorized to vote from being able to cast their ballot."

The American Civil Liberties Union is chief among the opposing voices to these bills. The executive director of the Kansas ACLU, Micah Kubic, argues the SAVE Database is not a reliable source.

“Chairman Proctor regularly attacks Loud Light, the ACLU, and Kansas Appleseed in his campaign-oriented, highly-partisan newsletter,” she said. “Coincidentally, he brings legislation that directly and indirectly retaliates against them for exercising the same rights everybody else does.

DeMond testified that HB 2448 subjects noncitizens to unfair treatment “when they pose absolutely no threat to their community.” He also said the legislation places an increased burden on poll workers who would have to correctly identify various immigration statuses. “(This bill) creates a two-tiered system of identification that treats people differently based on their citizenship status,” he said. "Driver’s licenses exist to confirm one's identity, not their personal background.”