County sees fewer voter registrations as deadline looms

A Sedgwick County official sees fewer registrations and advanced ballot requests as possible harbingers of a low-turnout congressional election next month.

Tuesday is the last day to register to vote in the special congressional election to replace Mike Pompeo, who was confirmed to lead the Central Intelligence Agency in the Trump administration.

Republican Ron Estes, Democrat James Thompson and Libertarian Chris Rockhold all seek to take Pompeo’s spot.

Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman said her office processed 11,832 voter registration applications from Jan. 1 to March 13 last year. That number fell to 9,088 during the same time-frame this year, which she attributed partially to the run up to last year’s presidential caucuses.

“We would have kind of expected to see an uptick in registrations for this special election and we have not seen that yet,” Lehman told county commissioners this week. “We are not seeing a large amount of activity for this election.”

Lehman said there were between 1,300 and 1,500 new applications from residents requesting to vote in the special election by mail. That compares to about 3,700 applications before the August primary last year.

“We are not seeing an overwhelming amount of indicators saying we’re going to have a large turnout for this election, but we’re still keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll have a good turnout,” she said.

The election’s office will mail out advance ballots on March 22. Early in-person voting begins March 27 at the downtown historic courthouse. The election is April 11.

Lehman said it’s tough to predict the turnout for a stand-alone, special election.

“We haven’t had one of these elections in 67 years,” Lehman said. “We just don’t know what to expect.”

But Lehman said they’re planning for the type of turnout they’d see in a general election to elect a governor, which doesn’t fall on presidential election years.

“It’s not looking likely we’re going to get anywhere near that so we’re planning on about 50 percent voter turnout just to make sure that we aren’t overwhelmed at the polling places,” she added.

“We’re kind of more in the territory of a city or school election,” she added after the meeting.

Chairman Dave Unruh called the lower-than-expected registration numbers “too bad.”

“We hope folks will…go out and cast a vote,” he said.

This story was originally published March 16, 2017 at 7:06 AM with the headline "County sees fewer voter registrations as deadline looms."