Sedgwick County recount of abortion vote delayed while officials seek more Democrats to help

A lack of Democratic Party counters and “logistics issues” have delayed a Republican-initiated recount of the abortion rights vote in Wichita, a Sedgwick County official said.

The recount won’t start until 7 a.m. Wednesday, a Sedgwick County’s election commissioner said. The results must be certified by Saturday. That puts Sedgwick, the state’s second-largest county by population, a day behind Johnson County — where a couple dozen election workers began sorting ballots into piles by precincts on Tuesday morning.

For the recount, the Sedgwick County Election Office is seeking 100 Republican and 100 Democratic party members to count ballots and ensure bipartisan representation. At least 100 Republicans had agreed to help with the recount by Tuesday afternoon but the election office had not hired enough Democrats, Libertarians and unaffiliated counters to round out the 200-member special recount board, Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Angela Caudillo said Tuesday afternoon.

“We have a lot of ballots to count, but that’s why we’re trying to get a big board,” she said. “I don’t foresee any problems with completing by the deadline.”

The Value Them Both amendment, which would have removed abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution, failed by more than 24,000 votes in Sedgwick County. But it was targeted, along with eight other counties, for a recount by anti-abortion activists Mark Gietzen and Melissa Leavitt, who paid roughly $120,000 for the partial recount.

Recount supporters have targeted some of the state’s largest counties — Sedgwick, Johnson, Douglas and Shawnee — putting election officials in those counties under increased scrutiny. The other counties chosen for recounts are Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson, Lyon and Thomas (the only county selected where amendment supporters outnumbered opponents).

In Sedgwick County, counters will work at the Sedgwick County Extension Center beginning Wednesday morning.

Counters will be compensated $7.50 an hour and should plan to be available from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday to Friday and possibly some of Saturday, Caudillo said. She would not say how many counters had signed up at a 4 p.m. Tuesday news conference.

“I can’t foresee anything, necessarily (that would change the results),” Caudillo said. “But, again, that’s why the process exists: for people who have questions, people who want to initiate the process, they can request the recount.”

Why a recount?

Gietzen, who has suggested without evidence that fraud occurred in the election, sued the secretary of state and county election officer to have drop boxes removed across the state before the vote on the amendment. The lawsuit was dismissed, but he said he plans to use any discrepancies that may surface in the recount to help his appeal.

In an interview, Gietzen acknowledged a recount likely won’t prove or disprove his theory that thousands of voters cast illegal ballots through the mail and ballot drop boxes as part of a massive ballot harvesting initiative, an unfounded idea he picked up from the debunked political movie “2000 Mules.” But it will test the voting tabulators used by the Sedgwick County Election Office.

“That’s the only way to make sure they’re not cheating with the algorithm, just to see if the computers are telling the truth or not,” he said. “The only way you can take the computer algorithm out of the picture is by doing the hand count.”

After that, he told The Eagle, he plans to start door-knocking in the counties where the recount was ordered to check whether voters live at the addresses where they were registered to vote on Aug. 2.

“I want to know if a human being voted,” he said. “And this is what we’re going to sample, maybe 10 out of every precinct. If I go out there and find, you know, 27 people that are supposed to be living in an abandoned house, that sort of thing, that’s what we want to be able to bring to the court.”

“I’ll promise you this,” Gietzen said. “If we get through this, and we find out everything was done perfectly accurate — nobody cheated, nobody did anything wrong, everybody that is on the list as having voted says, ‘Yes, I voted,’ I’ll accept the results.”

Local party involvement

On the political front, the local Democratic Party is seeking volunteers to make sure it has fair representation on the recount committee while the local Republican Party works to distance itself from the Value Them Both failure.

Joseph Shepard, chairman of the Sedgwick County Democratic Party, said he is contacting precinct committee members to get them to volunteer as counters and observers.

“The issue with this is not just getting people to sign up and show up but also be committed to those 12-hour shifts,” he said. “We also want to make sure that this process is going to run fairly and safely and securely, so I’m also focused on making sure that Democrats have poll agents who are going to be there to observe and make sure that everything is done correctly.”

“You can bet your last dime that I’m going to work overtime to ensure that we have people who are not only working to help recount all of those ballots but also observing.”

“Our goal is 100. We want 100,” Shepard said. “But we need at least 150 in my opinion.”

Sedgwick County GOP Chairman David Thorne said the willingness of Republicans to participate in the recount is not a reflection of efforts by the local party, who he said made no effort to sign up volunteers for the recount.

“The party’s not involved with that, at all,” Thorne told The Eagle. “The race is over, by a large margin.”

“We do have a lot of volunteers, and some of them — on their own — are probably going to be involved and just become a counter,” Thorne said. “But, the fact is, we’ve moved on. We’re focusing on growing the Wichita economy and setting the vision for that and winning in the general.”

Caudillo said anyone interested in working as a counter should send an email that includes their name and party affiliation to voterinformation@sedgwick.gov.

“Once we have all of those appointments made, we’ll send out emails to those that will be here and helping us count and give them information on when to come, what time their shift starts, things of that nature,” Caudillo said.

This story was originally published August 16, 2022 at 4:01 PM.