American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) marked Kansas' voter's ID law a bureaucratic move after requiring the citizens to provide further proof of citizenship for registration.
ACLU lawyer Dale Ho said some voters showed citizenship documents but were required to submit such again.
"It's a bit of a bureaucratic mess over there," said Ho.
In a suit filed in federal court, the ACLU claimed that more than 35,000 potential voters were blocked over two years from voting because of the additional hurdle - or nearly 14 percent of all new registrants.
The voters' ID law requiring documents like a birth certificate or U.S. passport for voter registration, which took effect Jan. 1, 2013, is one of numerous voter ID laws passed by Republican-led state legislatures in recent years.
The lawsuit takes aim at a measure that was pushed through the Republican-led Legislature five years ago by Secretary Kris Kobach, who has lobbied heavily for measures that he said were needed to prevent non-citizens from voting.
One of the plaintiffs in the suit, Ralph Ortiz, a U.S. Air Force veteran who registered to vote while renewing his driver's license, claimed he received a letter telling him he was suspended from voting. He had also required for additional proof of citizenship.
"I joined the military to help protect American freedoms, yet now I'm being denied the most fundamental right in our democracy," said Ortiz, 35, in a statement.
The lawsuit also named a 36-year-old Lawrence man who had been born on a now-closed Illinois military base and has not been able to find his birth certificate, and a 57-year-old Wichita woman who cannot afford the fee to get her Maryland birth certificate.
However, Kobach succinctly stated that, "The state has every right to verify that the person is eligible to vote before completing the person's registration." He is one of the authors of a controversial law passed in Arizona in 2010 that allowed law enforcement officers to question the immigration status of people they believe to be in the country illegally.
He additionally said that it was misleading that registrations were being purged because the people whose voter applications were in suspense had never officially been registered to vote. He challenged that assertion. There were some technical glitches in the early days of the law, but those have long since been resolved, he said.
The lawsuit names Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Secretary of Revenue Nick Jordan as defendants. Craig McCullah, a spokesman for Kobach, said the office was reviewing the lawsuit and had no immediate comment.
