Today is Election Day, but it could take 10 days to declare a winner
Wichita voters will cast their votes today in several local races, but it could take 10 days to find out who won.
If a majority of voters opt to write in candidates for any particular seat, then the races won’t be decided until a Nov. 15 canvass, when the Sedgwick County commissioners could vote on which variant spellings to count.
The Wichita mayoral race, where Jeff Longwell is defending his seat against challenger Brandon Whipple and three write-in candidates, could be the hardest to call.
“We’re used to between 500 and 1,500 write-ins for mayor. We just don’t know until we start tabulating ballots,” said Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman.
Although the election commissioner’s office will be able to provide the number of ballots that contain write-in votes this evening, it won’t announce who those votes are for until much later.
That’s because votes for write-in candidates are initially bundled and counted together until they can be sorted and approved by commissioners.
The three announced write-in candidates in the mayoral race are bound to shake things up.
Lyndy Wells, a retired banker who placed third in the August primary, has spent tens of thousands of dollars on his write-in campaign. Mark Gietzen, a prominent pro-life activist, has strong connections in some circles and could draw voters who support a candidate that is strongly against abortion. Marty Mork, a perennial candidate, has kept things at a grassroots level, appealing to voters on social media threads.
Together, the three write-ins could draw more votes than any single candidate on the ballot.
“We have no idea what to expect,” Lehman said.
Although voters in Wichita’s mayoral, City Council and school board elections have shattered records for early and mail voting, Lehman says she doesn’t know what to expect when the polls open today.
Voters were lined up out the door until noon Monday at the election office in the Historic Courthouse downtown, the last chance to vote before Election Day.
“Usually we have 30 to 40 voters on the day before an election,” Lehman said. “We had over 300 today.”
Overall, there’s a staggering difference in early and mail voting numbers since the last mayoral election in 2015.
At the close of early in-person voting on Monday, 6,736 people had cast ballots — nearly 2,700 more than the 4,084 who voted early four years ago.
About 13,200 mail ballot applications have been received for this election. That’s more than double the mail ballot requests in 2015, which was 6,500.
In addition, 6,300 mail ballots have already been returned, an increase of about 2,000 votes over 2015. That gap will grow as the final mail ballots come in in the next few days, Lehman said.
But she said doesn’t know what to expect in today’s election. It could mean more voters and higher turnout, or it could simply be the same voters as always changing their behavior and taking advantage of early voting opportunities, she said.
“In the (August) primary, there was a significant increase,” in early and mail voting, Lehman said. “And then we had basically the same turnout (as usual) on election day.”
This story was originally published November 5, 2019 at 2:24 PM.
