County, lawmakers battle secretary of state over law saying where you can vote
Sedgwick County is turning to the state Legislature to try to force Secretary of State Scott Schwab to let county voters choose their own polling place in this year’s upcoming elections.
A Republican lawmaker has agreed to introduce a bill to let the County Commission change the voting procedure without Schwabb’s blessing.
Meanwhile, the top Senate Democrat says he may take Schwab to court in an effort to make him comply with a law passed last year.
The law at issue would replace traditional polling places with “voting centers” around the community. Any voter could vote at any voting center, instead of having to go to an assigned polling place on election day.
Commissioners and legislators say they think Schwab has dragged his feet on implementing the law.
“I’m very frustrated over this thing,” said county Commissioner Jim Howell. “We passed this law last year, we pushed it forward late in the (legislative) session because we wanted to have this ready for the 2020 elections.”
“Now here we are eight or nine months later and he hasn’t written any rules and regulations yet. Why?”
Schwab says he supports the new law, but crafting the regulations and ensuring necessary cybersecurity precautions is a complicated process that won’t be done in time for this year’s presidential and Senate elections.
“We believe in the spirit of the law, we want to implement the law, but not in a way that makes people doubt the outcome of the election,” Schwab said. “There are a lot of people who want to influence elections. We want them to be candidates and voters only, not foreign players.”
Bill, lawsuit considered
In an effort to break the blockage, commissioners enlisted the help of Rep. Blake Carpenter, R-Derby, majority whip in the House and vice-chairman of the Elections committee.
He’s having the legislative revisor’s office draft a bill to give county commissions the authority to implement last year’s law without waiting for Schwab’s rules. That bill could be introduced as early as next week, Carpenter said.
On two occasions, Schwab has written to Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman directing her not to implement the 2019 law until he finishes the regulations.
“The revisors in the Legislature have already told me that the election commissioner has the authority to go ahead and push forward with this without rules and regs because of the way (last year’s) bill is written,” Carpenter said. “The issue with that, though, is she is employed by the secretary of state and so obviously her hands are very much tied.”
Carpenter and commissioners are hoping to fast-track the bill and get it passed and signed by March to allow the county enough time to put the new system in place for the Aug. 4 primary.
Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, said he is considering taking legal action to force Schwab to implement the law and “do his duty as the secretary of state.”
“I’m just concerned as to why he decided he’s not going to implement it for the 2020 election,” Hensley said.
A long process
Schwab said he’s got a task group working to write the regulations as soon as possible, but it’s complicated because state rules have to apply to everybody, not just tech-savvy counties like Sedgwick.
“Not every county has the same poll book,” he said. “Not every county has the same voting machines. So you have to get all those (vendors) in one room, that are competitors, agreeing to have a conversation that may compromise their system.
“Then you’ve got to get Homeland Security in there and working with the federal government has never been easy. Now we’ve got attorneys and election directors actually putting ink to paper. That’s not a fast process.”
Once the regulations are written, they’ll need to be reviewed by the attorney general’s office, which takes 30-45 days and then the Legislature’s Rules and Regulations Committee, which takes another month, Schwab said.
“Texas, it took four years,” he said. “We’re tacking at a pretty good rate.”
Schwab also said he’s reluctant to test any new voting system this year, when high turnout is expected with the presidential and Senate races on the ballot.
“One thing I’ve learned about elections is you don’t want to beta test a new program during a major election,” he said. “What we’d rather do is have the vote center bill happen in a local election where the volume is lower. And if there’s a mistake you have more bandwidth to overcome any mistakes.
System secure?
Sedgwick commissioners said they’re not trying to do anything new, just do on election day what they’ve been doing for years in every election with advance voting.
“I don’t see any reason we can’t do it,” said Commissioner David Dennis. “If he (Schwab) is saying that what we’re doing isn’t right, we’re going to have to stop all of our early voting that we do now. We don’t (propose to) do anything different, it’s just that we have more polling places on election day. It totally does not make sense to me what his concerns are.”
Howell said he thinks it disenfranchises voters if a county has the capability to allow them to vote at any polling place, but isn’t allowed to use it.
Voters who go to the wrong polling place on election day can already vote a provisional ballot and their votes will count for major offices such as president and Congress. But if they don’t vote in the right district, their votes for state legislators and other low-level offices are thrown out.
Howell also said allowing voters to go to the polling place of their choice could shorten lines on election day.
Sedgwick County already offers a cell-phone app that voters can use to get the waiting time to vote at any polling place in the county. If voters see there’s a long line at one, they’d be able to go to another where they wouldn’t have to wait as long, he said.
Howell said voting in Sedgwick County is a three-step process.
First, the election worker checks the electronic poll book to determine the voter’s eligibility.
Second, the information of what ballot they should get is taken to a voting machine, essentially a “glorified printer” where voters make their selections on a touch screen.
Third, the voting machine prints out their ballot, which the voter then puts into a counting machine that records the votes.
The only step in the process that is vulnerable to remote hacking is the connection between the election office and the poll book. Sedgwick County has solved that problem by renting bandwidth on a secure, encrypted network operated by Verizon, Howell said.
Howell said the way the law was written, counties that don’t have the technology, or just don’t want to have voting centers, don’t have to.
In addition, counties only have to comply with secretarial rules and regulations if Schwab chooses to make them.
“He doesn’t have to do that,” Howell said. “All he has to do is allow us to exercise what we’ve been doing (with advance voting) for years. And he’s not going to let us do it.”
Rural concerns
Schwab said he’s not too concerned about Sedgwick County’s ability to implement voting centers. Technically, the county should use a county-owned network for advance voting like all the other counties in the state, but the encrypted access system the county rents from Verizon is an acceptable compromise.
“They’re probably not supposed to do that, but because it was secure, the previous administration did not raise a stink,” Schwab said. “We’re not going to raise a stink to it because they’re wanting to use that for the vote center bill . . . If it’s secure, we’re good to go.”
But he said he is concerned about rural parts of the state, where secured network access isn’t as readily available or reliable as it is in the city.
“If there’s a network shortage, or a network outage, and suddenly a bunch of people don’t get to vote, that’s a bigger problem than implementing immediately,” Schwab said.
Every county a plan B in case of a network outage.
“I believe Sedgwick County’s got an answer (but) there’s a lot of counties that don’t have the resources to come up with that,” he said.
This story was originally published January 26, 2020 at 7:01 AM.
