Johnson County sends ballots containing withdrawn candidate Chad Taylor’s name

Johnson County sent out dozens of ballots to overseas voters with Democrat Chad Taylor’s name on them Thursday, before the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that he would not be on the ballot.

Brian Newby, the election commissioner for the state’s largest county, said Friday that new ballots without Taylor’s name have since been sent to all 77 voters.

Ten of the 77 ballots that were to be mailed were intercepted before they were delivered to the post office Thursday evening, Newby said.

The 67 ballots that were sent by e-mail included a note that cautioned the voters not to cast their ballots until after Monday because litigation might mean a change was coming, Newby said.

That change did happen when the court ruled shortly before 5 p.m. that Taylor’s name could come off the ballot.

“So (Friday morning) we sent another e-mail to everyone saying, ‘As we told you, we’re going to have to send you a new ballot. Disregard the ballot you have,’” Newby said.

“We sent out the ballot to the same people saying, ‘Here’s your new ballot without Chad Taylor,’” he added.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach said Johnson County was the only county to send out ballots with Taylor’s name on them.

Newby said he was “probably a little too eager” in sending out the ballots.

But concern about a federal law and a staffing issue in his office led Newby to decide to send out the ballots Thursday before the ruling.

A Department of Justice rule states that ballots for overseas military and civilian workers have to be sent out 45 days before the election. That would be Saturday.

But since that’s on the weekend, Newby said, his interpretation of the 45-day rule is that the ballots should all be sent by Friday.

He bumped up the sending date to Thursday because he knew one of the two staff members who is responsible for mailing out military and overseas ballots was not going to be able to work Friday.

“We didn’t want to get crosswise with the Department of Justice,” he said. “We were trying to do the right thing. We said, ‘Hey, this might not be the final ballot,’ but we’d cover ourselves with DOJ.”

He said the 77 ballots being sent are “unique” and had to be created separately. Each ballot was also put on four pages to better accommodate military fax machines, he added.

As it turned out, it took most of the Johnson County election office staff to put the correct version of the 77 ballots together on Friday, Newby said.

Newby said that if he had known the Supreme Court was going to make an announcement at the end of the day Thursday, “We would have held off.

“But we were afraid we were going into the weekend,” he said.

This story was originally published September 19, 2014 at 7:11 PM with the headline "Johnson County sends ballots containing withdrawn candidate Chad Taylor’s name."