In case it wasn’t already obvious, public officials in Kansas have some odd thoughts and feelings about voting.

From the Wichita Eagle:

A Brownback administration spokeswoman criticized the League of Women Voters on social media for promoting a college course aimed at registering to students to vote. The League is partnering with professors at Washburn, Emporia State and Fort Hays State universities to develop a lesson plan on Kansas voting laws that can be taught over a day or a week with the goal of helping college students successfully register to vote and enabling them to help their peers do the same. Angela de Rocha, spokeswoman for the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services, panned the idea on Facebook. “So it takes an entire semester to learn how to register to vote. Really?” de Rocha wrote on Facebook around noon on Monday. “Do we want these slow learners voting? Or is this a stealth course paid for by taxpayers to train left-wing ‘community organizers’ like the League of Women Voters on how to agitate?”

As a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Age and Disability Services, I’m sure de Rocha will soon come to appreciate just how offensive it is to say that “slow learners” shouldn’t vote.

As Rick Hasen notes on Election Law Blog, de Rocha’s assertion echoes a familiar refrain heard from conservatives around the country of late — that arbitrary benchmarks of sophistication are reason enough to disqualify someone from the ballot. As I’ve written before, when you make the claim that competence matters in determining who should be allowed to vote, you aren’t just making a claim about voting rights; you’re making a claim about the very definition of democracy.

It’s also particularly rich for de Rocha to claim that the League of Women Voters is a team of “left wing ‘community organizers'” given that the organization’s mission is simply to be pro-voting. I mean, I know conservatives have turned voting into a partisan issue of late, but damn.

De Rocha’s dismissal of students voting looks especially bad in Kansas, a state that has perhaps gone farther out of its way than any other state to make it difficult for people who aren’t rich, old and white to vote in recent years.

It’s precisely because Kansas has gone to such great lengths to make voting more difficult that voter education courses like the one the League of Women Voters is promoting here have become necessary. As the Eagle pointed out, more than 40 percent of people on the state’s “suspended voters list” — a list of people who are eligible to vote but did not submit proof of citizenship when they registered — are under the age of thirty. Many live on or near college campuses. As Kansas is one of just two states in the country that keeps separate voter rolls — one list for voters eligible to vote in all elections, and one for voters who are only eligible to vote in federal elections — the average citizen probably does need to sit down and have the process explained to them if they want to understand it fully. What’s more, the particulars of Kansas’s voting laws and how they differ from the rest of the country’s are not included in the state’s social studies curriculum or civics classes, so an optional college course seems to be the least the state could do to educate its citizens about how to participate in their own self-governance.

Of course, this flies in the face of what we generally think the principles of a democratic society should require. Voting is supposed to be easy precisely because we place only the most basic restrictions on eligibility. Being ruled mentally incapacitated by a judge is a valid reason to prevent someone from casting a ballot; failing to read up on the particulars of Kris Kobach’s latest regulation concerning voter registration procedures is not.

That is, as long as you think that the process really should be open to everyone.