Kansas court says the secretary of state violated open records law and made it hard to get...

The Republican secretary of state asked a private company to shut off a software function that makes it easy to retrieve certain public information.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab broke state law by taking action to prevent provisional ballot information from becoming public, the state’s second-highest court ruled on Friday.

The judges said that Schwab, a Republican, told a private company in 2020 to shut off a software feature that gave his office easy access to provisional ballot data and which, by extension, allowed the public to request the information.

So the company — which stores the Kansas statewide voter registration database — turned off the function at his request.

A three-judge panel unanimously concluded that the Kansas Open Records Act, or KORA, doesn’t allow Schwab to do that.