Sedgwick County Commission thumbs its nose at voters, again. Here’s how to fight back | Editorial

If the Sedgwick County Commission won’t uphold the basic principles of a democratic society, we will.

At the end of this editorial, you will find an application that you can print out and send in to get an advance mail ballot for the upcoming Nov. 7 election for city and school board races.

You can copy it off for family members and friends, or download additional copies from www.sedgwickcounty.org/elections/advance-mail-ballots

And we couldn’t more strongly encourage you to do that.

Four of the five Sedgwick County commissioners — Jim Howell, Ryan Baty, Pete Meitzner and David Dennis — say they support mail voting, but their actions say otherwise.

They’ve never sent these forms out for city and school elections and this week, the Republican commissioners voted to cut the funding to send them out for next year’s election for president, Congress, state Legislature and County Commission, as had been county practice from 2008 until last year.

It’s not hard to figure out why.

It’s an article of faith among Republican politicians that mail voters tend to skew more progressive.

So the GOP attacks mail voting at every turn — which, among other things, helped lead to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by an angry mob who believed, erroneously, that mail ballots helped steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

Locally, while ex-commissioner Michael O’Donnell has been gone from county government for almost three years, his political ghost continues to hover over the commission.

In 2020, O’Donnell was running for re-election when his scandal-plagued past finally caught up with him. He got nailed for participating with two other officials in a scheme to produce a flagrantly false attack ad on then-Wichita mayor candidate Brandon Whipple, and then tried to frame Sedgwick County Republican Chairman Dalton Glasscock for it.

The election-night count saw O’Donnell — who had already announced he’d step down rather than face ouster proceedings — leading by 576 votes. But challenger Sarah Lopez caught up and passed him when the final mail ballots were counted, winning by 264.

That sent a shiver through the commission’s GOP majority, so in 2022, they quietly decided not to send mail ballot applications to voters. Mail ballots fell from 54,000 to about 34,000.

Mission accomplished.

This time, they did it in public, but that doesn’t make it any better.

One of their justifications is that campaigns can and do send advance-voting applications to voters. The problem with that is they only mail applications to people who are the likeliest to vote for their candidate.

So if you’re not on the right campaign mailing list, sorry, you’re out of luck.

The commissioners’ other main justification was cost.

It’s nonsense. The $130,000 cost of the mailing isn’t even a rounding error in the county’s $520 million budget. And somehow, it didn’t seem to cost too much when the county mailed the applications from 2008 until they disappeared last year.

So please fill out the form at the end of this column and use it. Unless you’re disabled and fill out a different form, you need to do one every election.

We’d call on the commissioners — except Lopez who voted no — to reverse their decision, but it’d be a waste of pixels and ink.

Instead, we’ll call on Wichita, and all other local city governments, to fold up an application and send it out as an insert with the water bills.

If Howell, Baty, Meitzner and Dennis won’t defend the right to vote, it’s up to all of us to defend it for ourselves.

This story was originally published August 27, 2023 at 5:17 AM.