Progressive group in Kansas warned to stop paying high schoolers to register to vote

In a Sept. 25 cease-and-desist letter, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, accused a Kansas county chapter of the League of Women Voters (LWV) of bribing high school students to register to vote.

“The Office of the Attorney General has received information that in May 2026 the League of Women Voters of Leavenworth County distributed gift cards to individuals in exchange for registering to vote,” Kobach wrote to League of Women Voters of Kansas president Marlene Merrill.

“These prohibitions are essential to ensuring the integrity of state and federal elections. Beyond the direct corruption of the election, paying people to register destroys public confidence in elections, which is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy,” he continued. “The conduct which the League of Women Voters is alleged to have engaged in appears to violate both federal and state law.”

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Kobach also referred the matter to U.S. Attorney Ryan Kriegshauser of the District for Kansas for potential federal investigation and prosecution.

In his letter, Kobach also directed LWV to preserve all records relating to the illegal activity, including voter registrations and financial records, and to verify within 30 days of receiving the letter that the organization has halted the illegal activity.

According to a press release from the Kansas Attorney General’s office, LWV offered students at Lansing High School and Leavenworth High School $5 Starbucks gift cards to register to vote. Kobach said that organizations “may encourage registration and help eligible Kansans complete the process” but that they “may not buy registrations.”

“Paying people to register or to vote is illegal, period,” he said. “The size of the gift card does not matter.”

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Kansas House Elections Committee Chairman Rep. Pat Proctor, a Republican, first flagged LWV earlier this year for its high school voter registration drive, noting that the organization has been a frequent opponent of election integrity measures and a receptacle for left-wing dark money.

“The League of Women Voters of Kansas has long existed in a partisan ecosystem,” Proctor said in an interview with The Federalist. “I like to call them the axis of ballot harvesting.”

The news comes amid a high-profile push from the White House to pursue and prosecute election fraud. While much of President Donald Trump’s efforts have focused on foreign nationals registering to vote in U.S. elections, the administration has also warned state election officials of consequences for registering ineligible persons to vote.

“I think there are a lot of nervous election officials because I think some of them know that they've been looking the other way when this is happening, and we're catching it all over the country,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a Sept. 21 interview.

She noted that states like New Jersey have registered thousands of ineligible persons, including foreign nationals, to vote, which she suggested indicates a broader pattern of election fraud across the country.