‘When I took the ballot out of the envelope, it was already filled out — all the Republicans’
Ah, Sedgwick County, where your election ballot might come pre-marked for the Republican candidates.
That actually happened Tuesday to Scott Colby, a resident of east Wichita.
When he went to his polling place, at Wichita Brewing Company, he asked to vote on a paper ballot instead of a machine, as has been his habit for many years.
They handed him a ballot in a privacy envelope. When he sat down at the table to vote, he got a big surprise.
“When I took the ballot out of the envelope, it was already filled out — all the Republicans,” he said.
He took it to the poll worker and she called over the chief poll judge. The poll worker told them she had taken the ballot from a pile of fresh ballots.
I spoke to the poll judge and he confirmed that Colby did get a marked ballot. He said he’d separated it out and would give it to officials at the election office when he turned in the rest of the ballots, and let them decide what to do with it.
He said he couldn’t say any more because the election office had instructed poll judges not to talk to the media.
That’s apparently a new edict because they’ve always been able to talk to us before.
On getting a pre-marked ballot, Colby said, “it’s kind of disturbing to me that that could happen.”
Indeed it is.
Gerrymandering works
This election season, more of us didn’t get to vote for our state representative than did.
Out of 24 legislative races in Sedgwick County, only 10 had two candidates to choose from. And one of those has an asterisk because it was between a Democrat and a Libertarian.
Fourteen members of our legislative delegation ran unopposed — nine Republicans and five Democrats.
Of our contested races, only one was actually close.
In the unofficial final tally, Republican challenger Sandy Pickert led incumbent Democrat Chuck Schmidt by 51% to 49%, a total of 68 votes out of 5,248 votes cast.
The next closest race had a 10 percentage point difference.
Of the 10 contested races on local ballots, eight were won by Republicans. So that means the breakdown of the county’s legislative delegation for the next two years will be 17 Republicans, seven Democrats.
The last round of state House elections was a bit more robust. In 2020, there were 19 contested races and only four uncontested ones — three Republican and one Democrat.
What changed?
One of the biggest things was the district lines were gerrymandered by the Republican-dominated Legislature this year to protect Republican seats.
The way they did that was to pack more Republicans into Republican districts and more Democrats into Democratic ones.
That makes it almost impossible for a Democrat to successfully challenge a Republican on their turf. It’s equally hard for a Republican to win in a Democratic district, which there are, of course, fewer of.
Most people don’t run for office in a district where they’re essentially guaranteed to lose. Funny how that works.
So while we like to tell our children in civics class that it’s important to vote and that every vote matters, the truth is, at least as far as Kansas Legislature, your vote doesn’t really matter at all.
With one exception, every House election in the county was decided the day the Legislature approved the new district maps.
Get used to it, because it will be this way for the next 10 years — and probably far beyond that.
Cruse says bye, sort of
Well, Lacey Cruse isn’t the most gracious of defeated candidates.
She lost her seat on the Sedgwick County Commission by roughly 2,000 votes to mattress entrepreneur Ryan Baty.
We expect she probably had a lot to say about that last night.
But we don’t really know what it was because Cruse didn’t say it to us. An Eagle reporter tried to call her and got ghosted.
We sent a photographer over to Cruse’s election-night watch party, but when she got there, she was greeted with a sign on the door: “Come on in (unless you’re the media).” She took a picture of it and left.
I guess Cruse blames us for her defeat. It’s probably easier than blaming herself.
But let’s note this: we’re not the ones who made her go to a gay bar and racially insult a Black female bartender, which was probably the turning point of the race.
We just reported it.
This story was originally published November 9, 2022 at 1:11 AM.
