County officials crippled mail voting in sneaky, self-serving political act | Opinion
If you wind up in a long line to cast your vote this week, remember who put you there: the three Republicans on the Sedgwick County Commission: David Dennis, Jim Howell and Pete Meitzner.
In a sneaky and self-serving maneuver, they quietly did away with the election-season mailer that had an application you could fill out to vote at home by mail, which the county had been sending to all registered voters since 2008.
You’ll be paying for their mistake with your wallet and your time.
In the last midterm election, in 2018, more than 54,000 Sedgwick County voters applied for mail ballots. This year, it’s around 34,000.
So that’s approximately 20,000 voters who probably would have voted by mail if they’d gotten a reminder from the county.
Instead of a ballot application, we got a postcard a little over a week before the election, listing places you can vote in person. Those cards hit mailboxes last Friday, too late for mail voting to be a workable option.
The motive for discouraging mail ballots is really quite simple: In recent years, mail voting has tended to favor Democrats.
So our Republican commissioners threw mail voters under the GOP campaign bus.
Commissioners aren’t idiots. But they are enabling idiots in their party who claim, despite all evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen through mail ballot fraud.
If it serves the good of the party, they’ll go along to get along. Votes are votes, even if they come from crazy people.
The stated reason for dumping the mailing was cost. Funny, the election office has always been able to afford it before.
The cost of the postcard they did mail, plus 130 extra poll workers to try to mitigate long lines, will very likely cost more than sending mail-voting applications anyway. The election office has already racked up $1 million in overtime, and the commission Tuesday increased its budget by $605,000.
The County Commission never took a vote to scrap the mailer, but did pressure county Election Commissioner Angela Caudillo to do it. Not that she put up much of a fight.
If you missed it, there was a brief discussion of dropping the mailers in a June 28 county staff meeting. It was obviously already a done deal when they walked in the door.
After that informal meeting, money for the advance-ballot mailing mysteriously vanished from Caudillo’s budget.
For many years, Republican county commissioners and Republican election commissioners pushed mail voting as the cure-all for elections.
In 2006, citing increases in mail voting, they reduced the number of polling sites from 209 to 63. The predictable result was hourslong lines to vote.
Sending mail-ballot applications to all voters relieved the problem until the August primary, when polls were overwhelmed anyway by voters turning out to reject the anti-abortion-rights “Value Them Both” amendment.
Republicans, who went out of their way to put “Value Them Both” on an August ballot, were genuinely surprised when hordes of Kansans came to what was expected to be a low-turnout, Republican-dominated primary like we always have.
Today, county Republicans’ denials of attempted vote manipulation come off sounding hollow as a basketball, because the party is running exactly the same play across the country: suppress mail votes, create long lines in urban precincts, hope those people run out of time to vote.
We’re already seeing it. In the past, it took five minutes to vote at the downtown election office. Now it takes 45.
It’s too late to do anything about it by next Tuesday. About the only advice I can give now is gut it out through this election.
Vote at an advance voting site or Election Day polling place — and stay till you get to vote, no matter what. Bring your coat and a flashlight.
You can use that extra line-standing time to write Commissioners Dennis, Howell and Meitzner to let them know you don’t appreciate what they did — and don’t try it again.
This story was originally published November 2, 2022 at 11:02 AM.
