Kansas recount confirms referendum result in favor of abortion rights
OLATHE, Kan. — A decisive statewide vote in favor of abortion rights in traditionally conservative Kansas was confirmed with a partial hand recount, with fewer than 100 votes changing after the last county reported results Sunday.
Nine of the state’s 105 counties recounted their votes at the request of Melissa Leavitt, who has pushed for tighter election laws. A longtime antiabortion activist, Mark Gietzen, is covering most of the costs. Gietzen acknowledged in an interview that it was unlikely to change the outcome.
A “no” vote in the referendum signaled a desire to keep existing abortion protections and a “yes” vote was in favor of allowing the Legislature to tighten restrictions or ban abortion. After the recounts, “no” votes lost 87 votes and “yes” gained 6 votes.
Eight of the nine counties in the recount reported their results by the state’s Saturday deadline, but Sedgwick County delayed releasing its final count until Sunday because spokeswoman Nicole Gibbs said some of the ballots weren’t separated into the correct precincts during the initial recount and had to be re-sorted Saturday. She said the number of votes cast overall didn’t change.
A larger-than-expected turnout of voters Aug. 2 rejected the ballot measure, which failed by 18 percentage points, or 165,000 votes statewide.
The vote drew broad attention because it was the first state referendum on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade in June.
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Gietzen, of Wichita, and Leavitt, of Colby, in far northwestern Kansas, have both suggested that there might have been problems, but they have not pointed to many examples.
Kansas law requires a recount if those who ask for it prove they can cover the counties’ costs. The counties pay only if the outcome changes.
Leavitt and Gietzen provided credit cards to pay for the nearly $120,000 cost, according to the secretary of state’s office. Leavitt has an online fundraising page. Gietzen also said he is getting donations from a network built over three decades in the antiabortion movement.
Gietzen said Sunday that he did not accept the results of the Sedgwick County recount because of the discrepancy regarding the way the ballots were sorted and because some of the recount happened Saturday without outside observers present.
A conservative activist has called off his request for a recount in a rural California election that was won in a landslide.
“We still don’t know what happened in Sedgwick County. I won’t pay for Sedgwick County,” he said.
He said he’s also concerned about the statewide results because of a report out of Cherokee County, in southeast Kansas, about the results of one county election race being transposed between two candidates when the results were transferred on a thumb drive from one voting machine to a tabulating machine.
Gietzen said he plans to file a lawsuit Monday seeking a full statewide recount.
Gietzen said he won’t publicly report the names of private donors helping him finance the recount, even though a state ethics official says it’s required. Gietzen, who leads a small GOP group, the Kansas Republican Assembly, argues that he’s not campaigning for the antiabortion measure but is instead promoting election integrity.
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Votes were recounted in Douglas County, home to the University of Kansas’ main campus; Johnson County, in suburban Kansas City; Sedgwick County, home to Wichita; Shawnee County, home to Topeka; and Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson, Lyon and Thomas counties. Abortion opponents lost all of those counties except Thomas.
In Jefferson County, the margin remained the same, with the pro- and anti-amendment totals declining by four votes each. Linda Buttron, the county clerk, blamed the change on issues such as ovals not being darkened and “the challenges of hand counting ballots.”
In Lyon County, the anti-amendment group lost a vote. County Clerk and Election Officer Tammy Vopat said she wasn’t sure what the reason was. But she noted: “You have to factor in human error.”
Johnson County, the most populous in Kansas, faced the biggest recounting challenge because it had the most ballots. It pulled in workers from different departments to help. The sorting process took so long that the actual counting didn’t begin until Thursday afternoon.
“This is almost like doing an Ironman triathlon and having to add on another marathon at the end,” said Fred Sherman, the county’s election commissioner. “So it is quite a gargantuan process.”
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