Filing for Office in Topeka

The filing deadline is June 10th. I filed on June 9th to avoid all the people in a last minute rush. You can file for office two ways: by petition or by fee.

Paying the fee is easiest, of course. For a State Representative in Kansas it’s $50 to file and $55 in “administrative fees”, whatever those are. The fees are higher for higher political offices. To run for U.S. Senator, for example, it’s $1,652. Filing by petition means you don’t have to pay the filing fee, but you still have to pay the administrative costs and of course spend weeks gathering those signatures.

All of this filing is done at Kansas Secretary of State’s Office. A notary makes you sign a sworn statement that all signatures were acquired in your presence. They then take your petitions and check them against a list of registered voters to make sure they’re real people, not dead, etc..., which can take two or three days. My requirement was 51 signatures, but I got 193 signatures so that even if they couldn’t read or verify some of them I’d be sure to have more than enough.

I chose to drive to Topeka to file so I could also meet some people at the State Party Headquarters. It turned out that no one was there, but I got a chance to see the capital dome.

I thought, “Hey, I’d like to have a good campaign photo of myself in front of the capital.” I set my little camera on a wall and positioned it carefully before setting it to go off 10 seconds later. The distance around to where I should stand was too far, though, so I ended up with several photos of me barely in the frame. That’s called “running for office”, I guess.