Print edition: 
Now that Kansas has a secretary of state whose top priority seems to be making voting more complicated, Sedgwick County sorely needs an election commissioner committed to encouraging and enabling more people to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Too bad state law lets the former, Kris Kobach, hire the latter.
The risk is that Kobach will pick somebody for the Sedgwick County job who is less committed to encouraging voting and bolstering turnout than Commissioner Bill Gale has been over the past eight years — or, even worse, who shares Kobach’s hallucinations about fraudulent voters clamoring to get to the polls.
It’s a further concern that Sedgwick County will get a new election commissioner just as the state implements its voter ID law in 2012, when continuity in the office would have been a plus. Local election officials statewide are preparing to require voters to show photo ID starting next year and require proof of citizenship to register starting in 2013. Sedgwick County will adapt to the law as its new election commissioner learns the ropes.
Gale, who resigned last week to take a job with a nonprofit organization, worried many in the community, including The Eagle editorial board, by slashing the number of polling places by 70 percent in 2006. But he listened to the concerns, made adjustments accordingly and ultimately fulfilled his promises to promote early voting, both in person at satellite sites and by mail-in ballot. Gale helped turn Sedgwick County into an early voting pioneer, with 40 percent of ballots cast before Election Day, living up to his commitment in 2003 to be the area’s “ambassador for voting.”
Kobach and his pick must not do anything to end the positive trend of early voting — something that has happened in other states with tough new voting laws.
It doesn’t inspire confidence that Kobach is departing from the open, formal search process his predecessor, Ron Thornburgh, used in 2003 to replace 22-year Election Commissioner Marilyn Chapman, including a five-member committee that identified 46 qualified candidates via applications and held initial interviews.Instead, Kobach said, he is seeking elected officials’ recommendations and expects a smaller pool of candidates.
As he does, state legislators should reconsider whether it makes sense for local control to apply in 101 counties, where elected county clerks administer elections, but not in the state’s four largest counties — Johnson, Wyandotte and Shawnee as well as Sedgwick. State law says that in each county with more than 130,000 people, the secretary of state picks the county election official.
That process makes the person a political appointee unaccountable to local voters. Why shouldn’t all Kansans be able to vote for the person responsible for managing their local elections?
