BY DANIEL SAENZ
In the United States, congress has become largely ineffective as it has been reduced to a political circus rife with endless bickering. Some have even argued that the problem is that politics has largely been dominated by lawyers and business people. Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson noted this trend during an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher.
“What profession do all of these senators and congressmen have in common? Law, law, law, business, law,” said Degrasse Tyson. “Where are the scientists? Where are the engineers? Where’s the rest of life?”
So what exactly would a society governed by scientists look life? Well, it appears that Kansas could soon know the answer.
Recently, along with the Governorship in Kansas, the position of the Secretary of State is also up for election. While also campaigning to be Governor, current Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, will also be dealing with a challenger for his position. However, his challenger will not just be an ordinary politician with a law degree. Instead, it will be an accomplished engineer from Kansas: Brian McClendon.
After graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in electrical engineering, he went on to help design the special effects for Jurassic Park and even co-founded Google Maps and designed much of the software for Uber. However, he has decided to step away from these large scale endeavors to focus on running for office.
The job of the Secretary of State is to secure elections and keep the business and voting information of citizens safe. But McClendon feels that too many outside forces have been able to hack and access this confidential data and that there needs to be an improvement in security technology.
He feels that someone with his background is just right for dealing with this issue head-on as Secretary of State.
“I think that there are two main challenges that the state faces, the first of which is election security because I think we need to do a lot more to protect our election systems and the other is about voter participation and registration,” said McClendon. “We are 28th in voter registration and 34th in voter participation and that should just not be true as Kansas care a lot about politics and we should do what we can to have Kansas go out and vote.”
In order to combat this, McClendon helped create a website known as KSvotes.org, which allows users to register with their mobile phones and even sign with their finger and send it to the county clerk immediately via mobile. Over 8,000 Kansans registered using this system.
This showcased how improving technology and making the process smoother can often result in better voter turnout. This runs contrary to Secretary Kobach, who often speaks as if too many people are voting and are voting illegally.
“The Secretary of State has a huge platform to promote voter participation and registration. Secretary Kobach is just interested in partisanship,” said McClendon. “I think he spends too much time in court and has worked very hard to pass an unconstitutional law by requiring birth certificates. This leaves a great deal of legally-registered voters unable to vote if they cannot produce the certificate. Quite frankly, I think that’s criminal.”
Given the uniqueness of such a campaign, it is often hard to determine the chances of such a candidate.
“I think the people of Kansas will respond well to a problem solving engineer. After all, the Secretary of State’s office should be as non-partisan as possible because its main job is to make sure all votes are safe and counted equally and accurately,” said McClendon. “I have received a great deal of positive feedback from both Republicans and Democrats. So for that very reason, I think I have a good chance at winning.”
As of now, it is hard to tell what McClendon’s chances are. However simply running for office could very well change the political landscape of Kansas.