Kansas's Presidential Electors

Brian Amos

Associate Professor, Wichita State University

December 6, 2024

Introduction

If you found a link about Kansas's presidential electors interesting enough to click, then you probably don't need an explanation of the Electoral College, but as a refresher, presidents in the US aren't chosen by popular vote, they are determined by a vote of 538 presidential electors. This 538 is broken down by state, with each being alloted votes based on the number of members of Congress they have. For instance, Kansas has four members in the House and two in the Senate, so they have a total of six electoral votes. (DC doesn't have congressional representation, but gets three votes thanks to the 23rd amendment.) Additionally, all states except Maine and Nebraska award their electoral votes all-or-nothing, so that whichever candidate receives the largest popular vote in the state gets all of the electoral vote, no matter how close the margin.

These electoral votes aren't an abstraction, though, they refer to an actual group of 538 people who will each cast a vote on December 17th as part of the Electoral College. There is no single meeting of the college, but instead each state delegation meets at their state capital, and results are sent to Washington to be counted by Congress in early January. In the early decades of Kansas history, voters cast their votes directly for their electors, casting as many votes as there were electors. In Kansas, parties made endorsements for a "slate" of electors at their conventions - one from each of the congressional district conventions and two from the state convention - but voters could split their tickets if they wanted, or not use all of votes they were allowed, so that each elector ended up having slightly different vote counts. When primaries were introduced in the early 20th century, party conventions still made endorsements, but the final slate for each candidate was chosen by the party's voters, and it wasn't unusual for one or two self-nominated electors to win a spot. In the general election, electoral slates were voted on as a group with their presidential candidate, so that ticket splitting was not possible. Starting in the 1960s, primaries for electors ended, and today, party committees decide the slate of electors without popular input. Additionally, lists of electors no longer appear on the ballot alongside their presidential candidate.

As a result of this modern system, most people have no idea who their presidential electors are. At the bottom of this page is the full list of Kansas's electors from its first election in 1864 through to 2024. The primary sources for the list were Secretary of State reports archived by the Kansas Historical Society and a range of old Kansas newspapers hosted by newspapers.com. I was pointed to James B. Randall's U.S. Electoral College Roster site later in the process than I would have liked, but it helped fill in gaps and catch a couple of errors I had made, and I also received some help from the National Archives, who hold the copies of electoral vote reports for each state going back to 1888. Biographical information was also sourced from FamilySearch and Find a Grave.

Statistics and Random Facts

Kansas has cast a total of 309 electoral votes.

• 244 votes were for Republicans.
• 45 votes were for Democrats.
• 20 votes were for the People's Party's candidate, although in both elections the Democratic Party chose not to oppose the populists, and in one of the elections, the Democrats actually ran a fusion ticket with their electors.

285 people have served as presidential elector. This includes:

• 265 people who served once.
• 17 people who served twice.
• Two people who served three times: Henry Otto (1944, 1960, 1968) and Mark Kahrs (2016, 2020, 2024).
• One person who served four times: Helen Van Etten (2008, 2012, 2016, 2020).

More electors have been from Sedgwick County than any other, at 29. The others with 10 or more have been Johnson (25), Shawnee (20), and Riley (10). 21 counties out of 105 have never had an elector. A map of electors by county (click to expand):

Seven people (in eight cases) were elected to be presidential electors but did not cast their vote, usually due to illness - a replacement cast it instead. Two worth highlighting:

• In 1972, Tony Mesa had trouble finding parking, and was about 15 minutes late to the vote. In that time, Joan Baker was chosen to replace him.
• Joe Wolf was voted to be an elector twice, in 1940 and 1944, and missed both votes.

The Constitution says that "no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."

• Future members of Congress have served as electors, such as William Peffer (1880) and Ron Estes (2016).
• Current state officials have served as electors. One notable example was Robert Frederick Bennett, governor at the time of the 1976 election, filling in when L. H. Ruppenthal was unable to attend.
• In a handful of cases, people were nominated by party conventions but were replaced before the election after it was revealed that they were federal officeholders. For example, in 1928, Daniel R. Anthony III was replaced when it was decided that his role in the Officers' Reserve Corps disqualified him.

This year, Kristi and Mike Brown have become the first married couple to be electors for Kansas in the same year. However, there have been two other married couples where each has been an elector, but in different years.

• Susan Estes (current state rep) was an elector in 2000, and her husband Ron (current US rep) was an elector in 2016.
• Ella Hobble was an elector in 1920, and her husband Frank was an elector in 1948. Both served in the era of primary elections for electors, and both put forward their own names without a party convention endorsement.

Early in Kansas's history, it was common for newspaper editors to be named as presidential electors - among the 59 electors from the 19th century, at least 15 ran newspapers at some point in their lives. This reflected an era of partisan press that began to wane with the turn of the 20th century.

Other random notable electors from early in Kansas's history:

• Each of the 1868 electors was notable enough to have a Wikipedia article. Albert H. Horton went on to be Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, Isaac Smith Kalloch later became mayor of San Francisco, and Daniel Read Anthony was Susan B. Anthony's brother.
• John Waller (1888) went on to be named consul to Madagascar. His story there is long and interesting, lasting past his consulship and involving his daughter marrying into the royal family and a dream of starting a Liberia-like settlement on land he had been granted. It ended with him imprisoned in France and requiring US diplomatic intervention to be released.
• Eugene Ware (1888) had national fame as a poet, writing under the pseudonym "Ironquill."
• Several prominent black rights advocates have served as elector. Charles Henry Langston (1872) was a part of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and was the first president of Quindaro Freedman's School (later Western University), the first HBCU west of the Mississippi River. His grandson was poet Langston Hughes. Isaac F. Bradley, Sr. (1900) was the first black graduate of KU Law and was one of the "Original Twenty-Nine" of the Niagara Movement, a predecessor of the NAACP.
• Being a presidential elector occasionally appears in someone's obituary as something notable about their lives, but Matie Toothaker Kimball (1920) took it a step further and had "first woman presidential elector from Kansas" on her gravestone (see below). However, she was the second woman to be elector, with Emma Layman having served in 1916.

Credit: GeekyGraveGirl at findagrave.com

Electors

Below is the full list of electors from Kansas over the state's history. Click on a column header to sort by that value. I've made an effort to find first and last names of all electors; the norm for the early electors was to appear on the ballot by their first and middle initials, and some of the early women were listed under their husband's names (e.g., Minnie Mickel (1928) was listed as "Mrs. Ben L. Mickel"), so this listing is not the same as what a voter might have seen at the time.