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VOTE411 Voter Guide

Kansas Senate, District 08

The Kansas Senate is the upper house of the Kansas Legislature, the state legislature of the U.S. State of Kansas. It is composed of 40 senators representing an equal amount of districts, each with a population of at least 60,000 inhabitants. Members of the Senate are elected to a four-year term. There is no limit to the number of terms that a senator may serve.

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  • Candidate picture

    Cindy Holscher
    (Dem)

  • Candidate picture

    Benee' Hudson
    (Rep)

Biographical Information

What makes you the best candidate for this position? What skills, expertise, or competencies qualify you?

What are Kansas's three most important issues, and how do you intend to address them?

How would you make it easier for Kansas citizens to follow bills as they flow through the legislature? What, if any, changes would you propose in the “Gut and Go” process?

Would you support changes to Kansas election laws and voting systems? Why?

Ballot City Overland Park
Campaign Web Site http://cindyforsenateks.com
Campaign Phone 9135684293
Campaign Address PO Box 4781 Olathe, KS 66063
Mailing Address PO Box 4781
Olathe, KS 66063
Personal Biography Former executive with Sprint Publishing with experience in collaboratively developing product improvements, recruiting and developing employees, developing and maintaining multi-million dollar budgets
Education University of Missouri - Columbia; BS in Journalism and Political Science
Community/Public Service -former Volunteer for Harvestor's BackSnack program -Served as a volunteer/leader for the PTA on the local and state level -Volunteer for local library and public schools
I'm the best candidate for this position for several reasons: 1) an established leader who works in a collaborative fashion as exemplified by co-founding the Women's Bipartisan Caucus which helped end the disastrous Brownback experiment 2) works for the people, not special interests (donations to my campaign are primarily individuals that live in Kansas, whereas many candidates rely mainly on PACs, dark money, etc.) 3) willingness to listen to constituents; my job is to serve the people, not lobbyists or special interest groups 4) passionate about helping students succeed; when the Brownback experiment was negatively impacting our public schools due to severe budget cuts, walked to Topeka TWICE to bring attention to the issue
1) Healthcare Access - Continue to work with the Gov as well as legislative peers to bring Medicaid Expansion to the state and maintain access to reproductive healthcare

2) Invest in Education - maintain full funding of general ed and spec ed (despite the efforts of extremists to defund our award-winning public schools). Will achieve this by continuing to inform the pubic as well as legislative peers of the negative impact of vouchers/privatization as well as by working with pro-public education organizations to strengthen messaging regarding the successes of our public schools

3) Continue to strengthen the economy by working to attract strong jobs to the state & maintain a tax structure that benefits the working people vs. the wealthy
-The "gut and go" process needs to be eliminated as it is not a transparent, citizen-focused procedure. - In terms of making it easier for Kansas citizens to follow bills through the legislature, I think it would be advisable for the state to look at utilizing new software that is more user friendly to citizens. Some of the programs available offer tracking systems that provide alerts on certain topics/issues and summaries of legislation, whereas currently it can be time intensive/complicated for an individual to locate bills or info on the ksleg website.
I am in favor of initiatives to make it easer to vote including: 1) automatic voter registration as a part of DMV activities 2) portable registration - which would keep voters’ registrations active when they move within the same state 3) Implement "no excuse" permanent advance/mail ballot; currently in Kansas, an individual has to provide a medical reason to vote by mail on a permanent basis (or they have to fill out an application for each election).

The main issue currently is the fact the legislature continues to attempt to pass restrictive voting laws (i.e. removal of ballot drop boxes, etc.).
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