Sedgwick County finishes abortion ballot recount. Here’s when the results will be known

Sedgwick County finished counting votes early Friday afternoon in a recount of a failed ballot question that sought to remove the right to an abortion from the Kansas Constitution.

Results may not be posted until Saturday morning.

Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Angela Caudillo said after the recount that she has no reason to believe the landslide victory for abortion rights would change in the state’s second-largest county that includes Wichita, the most populous city in Kansas.

“We didn’t see anything that we would expect to make a swing in that direction at all,” Caudillo said.

Election workers were still manually entering handwritten vote counts into a spreadsheet at 2:30 p.m. Friday. Those numbers will be reported to the canvassing board Saturday morning. The board of canvassers will meet around 8 a.m. on Saturday to certify the results. The recount must be completed and certified by 5 p.m. Saturday.

The recount was an attempt to overturn or cast doubt on the first statewide victory for abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned decades of federal protections in June.

Melissa Leavitt, an election denier from Colby who requested the recount, and Mark Gietzen, an anti-abortion activist and former chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party who helped pay for the recount, have — without evidence — blamed the loss on widespread election fraud in Kansas. They raised enough money to force a recount in nine out of 105 counties.

The proposed Value Them Both amendment failed 58% to 42% in Sedgwick County and 59% to 41% statewide. With 147,747 votes cast in Sedgwick County, 24,099 more people voted against the amendment than supported it, official results show.

Working from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., election workers counted 50,000 ballots on Wednesday — a full third of all the county’s ballots, putting the county on pace to finish the hand recount by late Friday night or early Saturday morning, Caudillo said on Thursday.

Sedgwick County beat its goal with the help of around 150 election workers, Caudillo said.

“We have people coming in day after day,” Caudillo said. “Some are working shorter shifts, some are working 12 hours or longer.

“We have our supervising judges who have been working on this election since mid July. So there are a lot of people who have put a lot of effort into this process.”

Caudillo said the county government has committed precious resources to helping the election office finish the recount on time.

“We’ve had, actually, a lot of support from the Sedgwick County organization as a whole, from employees coming out to help to the manager’s office helping us get a location.”

Caudillo said she doesn’t have an opinion on the necessity of a recount on a race decided by nearly 20 percentage points.

“Anything that’s required of us as the Election Office is stuff we do, and this is just one of those tasks,” she said.

Ballots were recounted in four of the state’s most densely populated counties — Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Douglas, which all rejected the ballot by a wide margin — and four smaller counties where the amendment failed. Those counties were Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson and Lyon. They also ordered a recount in Thomas County, where voters favored the amendment.

Johnson County, the state’s largest by population, was still counting votes on Friday afternoon. Johnson County Election Commissioner Fred Sherman said Friday he’s hopeful the recount will finish by the end of the day in preparation for an 11 a.m. Saturday canvass.