My mistake: Trusting Sedgwick County to run a fair and ethical election | Opinion
Sedgwick County is demanding a correction on a column I wrote last week titled “County officials crippled mail voting in sneaky, self-serving political act.”
They’re not getting one. I only correct things that are wrong.
I take accuracy very seriously and if I’d made a mistake, I’d correct it as fast as I could.
In this case, it’s the county government that made a mistake — suppressing mail voting. And some folks over there don’t like that I told you about it.
In my column, I explained that the reason mail voting is down by at least 20,000 voters leading up to Tuesday’s election is that the Republican county commissioners and election commissioner decided to stop sending mail-ballot applications to all registered voters in the county, which had been done for every statewide general election since 2008.
It was a major change in election procedure done without public notice or a public vote.
Suppressing mail voting is part of a nationwide strategy by Republicans to enhance their election chances where they control the voting apparatus. It’s happened here and at the Kansas Statehouse, where legislators passed a law — since blocked by a federal court — making it illegal for nonprofit groups to send mail-ballot applications to voters.
There are two types of Republicans doing this stuff:
The True Believers who still think the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump through mail-ballot fraud, despite mountains of evidence proving otherwise.
And opportunistic Republican politicians who know better, but are cynically attacking mail voting because Democratic voters have used it more than Republican voters in recent elections.
Our Republican county commissioners, David Dennis, Pete Meitzner and Jim Howell, all oppose you being sent a mail-ballot application. Democratic commissioners Lacey Cruse and Sarah Lopez support it.
The county’s main complaints about my column are 1) Meitzner missed the part of a June 28 county staff meeting where elections were discussed and 2) Mail ballot applications were still available online and by request.
Their third claim of inaccuracy is that the money that paid for mailing ballot applications in the past couldn’t have been removed from the budget because it wasn’t in the budget — or something like that.
Let’s take these one at a time.
1) It didn’t matter whether Meitzner was at the June 28 meeting or not, because based on the discussion it was obvious that the decision to kill the mailers was made before commissioners even walked in the room. Frankly, the county should count themselves lucky if nobody files a complaint with the district attorney under the Open Meetings Act.
2) Voters didn’t know they had to request a mail-ballot application because for the past 14 years they’d gotten one in their mailbox from the county. If I’d known in time, we’d have printed the application in the paper so people could clip it and send it in. Not everybody subscribes, but it would have been better than nothing.
3) I am totally uninterested in splitting hairs with the county over whether the money for the mass-mailing mysteriously disappeared from the budget, as I said in my original column. The fact is, in every general election cycle from 2008 to 2020, it was there, and in 2022 it was gone. No amount of semantics changes that.
I did make one mistake: I trusted the Sedgwick County Commission to conduct an election with integrity and fairness, and I trusted new Election Commissioner Angela Caudillo to fight for voter access in Sedgwick County, like her predecessor Tabitha Lehman did.
I’ll live with that mistake. Rest assured I won’t repeat it.
There’s only one way to fight this kind of chicanery, and that’s to show up Tuesday and vote like you mean it.
With so many mail votes taken out of the mix, the lines will probably be lengthy, especially in urban neighborhoods.
But persevere. Polls open at 6 a.m. and if you’re in line before 7 p.m., they have to let you vote, no matter how long it takes.
This county government is in dire need of a reminder that American citizens — Republicans, Democrats, and independents — will not tolerate election tampering by self-serving politicians.
Your presence in a voting booth on Tuesday is the only way left to get that message across. Be there.
This story was originally published November 7, 2022 at 9:21 AM.
