Final election result: Lopez beats O’Donnell, wins Sedgwick County Commission seat

Sarah Lopez has defeated former Commissioner Michael O’Donnell, becoming the first Hispanic woman ever elected to the Sedgwick County Commission and the first woman elected to represent District 2.

The final vote count released Monday showed Lopez, a Democrat, won the election over Republican incumbent O’Donnell by 264 votes. The final tally was 17,041 (49.7%) to 16,777 (48.9%) in favor of Lopez.

It took until Monday to certify the election because of an unusually high number of provisional ballots that had to be accepted by the county Election Board and counted over the past weekend. There were about 10,200 ballots accepted for counting on Friday.

Lopez will be the first Hispanic woman and the seventh woman to serve on the Sedgwick County Commission since the board was created in 1953.

“That’s a lot of pressure,” Lopez said. “But I definitely think it’s important to show young girls that you don’t have to be a certain type of person to run for these seats.

“Having more women involved and having more diversity is always a good thing,” Lopez said. “Getting more voices from more than just the same person over and over is how our community grows, so I’m really excited to see what we can come up with and see what we can get done.”

Lopez joins Democrat Lacey Cruse as the second woman and second Democrat on the County Commission, which as recently as two years ago was composed of five white, Republican men.

Lopez, who has worked in the Ascension Via Christi health care system since she was 18 years old, said she wants to focus on improving health — physical and mental — in Sedgwick County. Her first order of business will be restoring trust in the County Commission after O’Donnell’s tenure, she said.

One of her first initiatives will be setting up a district advisory board so her constituents can help hold her accountable and make sure she is acting in the interest of her entire district, not exclusively in the interest of those that voted for her, she said.

“It’s going to be hard, because I feel like I’m going to have to come in and do some damage control after our last commissioner,” Lopez said.

County Commission race close

The Lopez-O’Donnell race was too close to call on election night. Lopez started the night leading but ended the night trailing O’Donnell by 576 votes. Three days later, Lopez took the lead again by 125 votes.

“It was a really, really close race,” Sedgwick County Democratic Party Chair Joseph Shepard said Monday. “We were sitting on the edge of our chairs. You just never know until every single vote is counted. That’s why Sarah didn’t concede on election night and why the party stood by her until the very last vote was counted.”

Late ballots included mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received by Friday and provisional ballots — those cast when a voter’s eligibility is in doubt. Reasons can include not bringing a valid ID to the polls on Election Day and showing up at the polls after requesting an advance ballot.

Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman said the biggest group of provisional votes, about 4,300, came from people who had requested mail-in ballots but changed their mind and decided to vote in person on Election Day.

About 80 people cast two ballots in the election.

Some of those were mail voters who also cast a provisional ballot. A small number had cast a provisional ballot at the wrong polling place, then went to their own precinct and voted again when they realized they hadn’t gotten to vote in every race they were eligible for.

She said those votes were weeded out and there was no immediate indication of voter fraud. Her reading of the situation was that the voters were trying to make sure they got one ballot counted.

She said she will review those ballots and if there is any indication of attempts to double vote, she’ll refer it to the district attorney for investigation.

Who fills O’Donnell’s seat until January?

Someone besides Lopez or O’Donnell will fill the commission seat until Jan. 10, when Lopez will be sworn into office. O’Donnell resigned Friday after the Sedgwick County District Attorney said he would file ouster proceedings if O’Donnell didn’t step down voluntarily.

That decision now triggers a special Republican convention with a mini-election, where 31 members of the Republican Precinct Committee in the 2nd District will choose O’Donnell’s successor for the remainder of his term.

The Republican Party will have to schedule that convention to occur no sooner than seven days and no later than 21 days after the vacancy, which was Friday, according to state law.

Before the election, O’Donnell had announced that he would not accept nor serve a second term, a last-ditch bid to keep the seat under Republican control for the next two years until his replacement would have to seek re-election.

David Thorne, recently selected as county Republican Party chairman, congratulated Lopez on winning the close race.

He said details on temporarily replacing O’Donnell are still being worked out, but he’ll call the convention to fill the remainder of the term within the next three weeks as the statute requires.

“We (Republicans) are responsible for the next two months,” he said. “We will put a quality person in that seat.”

Thorne said it’s unlikely that a serving officeholder or person with a full-time job would want to give that up for such a short stint on the commission. But he said he has heard from people who want to serve in the short term.

He said he couldn’t reveal any names yet.

Bob Weeks, a longtime Republican activist who runs the Voice For Liberty blog, suggested the best course for the precinct committee would be to acknowledge Lopez as the winner and install her into office early. The Republicans who will choose O’Donnell’s immediate successor don’t have to pick a Republican, especially when the term will run eight weeks at most, including holidays when there aren’t any scheduled meetings, he wrote Monday.

“The decent and reasonable thing to do is for the nominating convention to meet and select Sarah Lopez to fill the remainder of the term,” he wrote. “It is already decided that she will become the commissioner on January 10. It would make sense for her to start her term early, thereby avoiding a lot of time and effort for no good reason.”

Five Republicans had expressed intentions to seek the party’s nod to replace O’Donnell: Wichita City Council member Jeff Blubaugh; state Rep. Nick Hoheisel; Kathleen Garrison, who finished second to O’Donnell in the August Republican primary for the seat; Cindy Miles, who ran third in the primary; and Jared Cerullo, a former TV reporter.

It’s uncertain if any of them would be interested in temping on the commission.

Hoheisel, who attended Monday’s final vote canvass, said it was disappointing that the party lost the seat, which he had planned to compete for if the election had gone the other way.

“It is what it is, in the words of the president,” he said.

O’Donnell did not return a phone call seeking comment.

O’Donnell campaign roiled by scandal

Before announcing plans to step down, O’Donnell’s campaign had been hampered by revelations that he was one of three Republican elected officials behind a smear campaign in last year’s mayoral election that included a video ad falsely accusing Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple of sexually harassing college-age female Capitol interns while he served as a state representative.

The crushing blow that triggered his resignation came 11 days before the Nov. 3 election, when Matthew Colborn, the young video entrepreneur who made the attack ad, released a secret recording he’d made of O’Donnell, City Council member James Clendenin and state Rep. Michael Capps plotting to blame the false ad on Dalton Glasscock. At the time, Glasscock was chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party — one of O’Donnell’s closest friends and campaign manager of his 2016 election when he took the seat from Democrat Tim Norton.

The three officials had gone to great lengths to hide their involvement in the false attack, collecting money for it through a nonprofit sports charity run by Capps and launching the ad itself from behind the shield of an anonymous shell company created in New Mexico, a state where business entities don’t have to reveal their true owners.

The ad’s falsity was immediately apparent. The accusations of misconduct it pushed were lifted from a Kansas City Star/Wichita Eagle story about interns’ complaints against Republican state senators. Whipple was a Democrat in the state House of Representatives.

The video traced back to Colborn through one of the actresses who was in it. She told the Eagle she was paid $50 to appear in silhouette reading from a script of accusations that she was told would be used in a public service announcement against domestic violence.

Colborn’s secret recording surfaced after he was dropped from a defamation lawsuit filed that Whipple filed to find out who was behind the attack, an outside effort designed to boost the re-election bid of then-Mayor Jeff Longwell.

Longwell denounced the ad as “slimy” when it came out and after Whipple won, Longwell said the backlash over it contributed substantially to his election defeat.

O’Donnell and Clendenin have said they raised money from local business leaders for what they had expected to be a billboard campaign supporting Longwell. Recent court documents from Whipple’s lawsuit indicate it was O’Donnell who came up with the idea of trying to derail Whipple’s campaign using the bogus sexual harassment attack.

Lopez faced her own set of false attacks from O’Donnell and his supporters.

In August, fresh off a primary election victory, O’Donnell began accusing Lopez of not living in the 2nd District in southwest Sedgwick County, which includes parts of south Wichita, Haysville and Clearwater. Later that month, radio host and O’Donnell ally John Whitmer sent a formal complaint challenging her residency status in an attempt to remove her from the ballot.

The complaint was quickly slapped down by a Sedgwick County panel and Whitmer was assessed $175 in investigative charges for filing what the panel determined to be a baseless allegation.

In October, O’Donnell and the Kansas Republican Party ran attack ads against Lopez that featured an altered photo of Lopez to support a claim that she was anti-police. In the original photo, Lopez was actually praying with Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay at a Black Lives Matter rally at a police station.

This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 12:06 PM.