Sedgwick County election commissioner recruiting family, friends to work polls

Several of Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman’s family and friends are helping her run the county’s elections, raising some concerns among those who are watchdogs for election integrity.

County records show that Lehman’s election crew includes her brother, her son, her nephew and another nephew’s fiancee. The nephews are both sons of a candidate in the upcoming election Tuesday, state Rep. Jim Howell, who is running for the Sedgwick County Commission.

Another county department is sending Lehman’s sister-in-law to help out on Election Day, which she has done for years. And the roster of election board workers includes eight of Lehman’s friends who are active in the same church as she and her relatives.

Lehman’s husband, Jeremiah, has, in at least one past election, volunteered in the office, working on equipment and carrying electronic ballot cartridges from room to room. Lehman said he will have no working role in this election but may drop by to visit her.

Although they represent a small fraction of the 600-plus total election workers, Lehman’s relatives and friends are among 45 workers with government e-mail addresses used to allow workers at advance-voting sites to access secured databases used to vet voters.

Lehman said a staff member had “randomly picked board workers to get e-mail accounts.” She said Thursday that she’ll change that process to use generic addresses in the future rather than assigning the addresses to individuals.

Lehman said she recruited from her family and church acquaintances because of a chronic shortage of “board workers,” the people who run the polling places. Her nephew’s fiancee, a full-time employee of the election office, worked there before she got engaged to Caleb Howell, an employee in the county Register of Deeds office and son of Lehman’s brother-in-law Jim Howell.

Register of Deeds Bill Meek confirmed he’s lending his office assistant, Lehman’s sister-in-law Victoria Leiva, to the election department for Election Day. He said she has done that for years, preceding Lehman’s term in office.

Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the state’s top election official, confirmed there is a “desperate” shortage of applicants for the work and said “there’s no prohibition against recruiting among your relatives if you’re a county election commissioner.”

However, some fair-election advocates said that, legal or not, the practice diminishes public confidence in the integrity of the election system.

“It does not give you confidence that the office is being run impartially or with any oversight,” said Carole Neal, co-president of the Wichita chapter of the League of Women Voters. “For our public to feel confident in the election process, there should be a no-family rule.”

Women for Kansas, a relatively new political action group with Republican and Democratic members, also is concerned about Lehman’s friends and family working the election, said spokeswoman Cindy Kelly. She said it could be seen as nepotism, which is generally banned from government to guard against the appearance of impropriety.

Lehman said it’s difficult to find enough people to do election work and it’s “completely normal” for election officials to recruit their family and friends.

“I recruit all the time; I’m constantly looking for board workers,” she said. They’re listed as county workers because “all of our board workers are county employees by law,” she said.

Lehman’s predecessors confirmed they also had tapped family labor, but not to the extent Lehman has.

Bill Gale, who ran the office from 2003 to 2011, said he had one family member who worked on elections, his father.

He said he didn’t recruit his dad but signed off on it because a staff member who hired poll workers asked him to. “It definitely wasn’t my idea,” he said.

He said his wife volunteered a couple of times, doing work like loading poll books on a delivery truck, but that she didn’t have access to ballots or counting equipment.

Gale’s predecessor, Marilyn Hansen – formerly Marilyn Chapman – said she tapped her family only once in the 22 years she was election commissioner. Her husband worked a single election day because a poll worker had an emergency and she asked him to fill in, she said.

County pay records show that Lehman’s family members worked more than one day for the August primary election.

Her son, Nathan Lehman, worked 38 hours the week of the primary. Her brother, David Gass, and nephew Isaiah Howell each worked 20 hours. Each was paid $7.50 an hour.

Her church friends mostly worked 16-19 hours, also at $7.50 an hour, although one logged a full 40 hours during election week.

Kobach said poll worker shortages are a recurring problem and that recruiting family and friends seems to be a rational response.

The political parties are supposed to provide election offices with lists of enough people willing to serve, but they haven’t been doing enough of that in recent years, he said.

“Most of our people have white hair, and there aren’t enough younger people coming in to replace them,” he said.

That, he said, leaves county election officials to scramble to find people where they can.

The election office has been beset with election-day problems in recent years.

During the August primary, an election worker checked the wrong box in a computer form that caused incorrect results to be reported on the county website, which was the only publicly available source of election-night returns.

In 2012, glitches resulted in long delays in the count during both the primary and general elections, which infuriated candidates and their supporters who had gathered to watch the returns come in.

Rep. Jim Ward, D-Wichita and a candidate in Tuesday’s election, said there’s been an ongoing lack of professionalism at the election office since Kobach appointed Lehman in 2011. He said hiring family members to work elections adds to that.

“Elections are important – that’s a professional activity,” he said. “It’s not something you run out of a family rec room.

“When you’re in charge, you’ve got to be beyond reproach,” he said, “so that no one can raise questions about the integrity of the count.”

This story was originally published October 30, 2014 at 9:06 PM with the headline "Sedgwick County election commissioner recruiting family, friends to work polls."