Despite Trump’s attacks, Kansas voters request 2020 mail ballots at historic rate
Johnson County election workers spent Memorial Day weekend sending out roughly 380,000 applications for mail ballots — one to every registered voter in the state’s most populous county.
Kansas has allowed voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason since 1996. But the unprecedented move by county officials reflects COVID-19’s impact on the mechanics and politics of voting in 2020. Their hope is to prevent long lines in August and November, as voters elect a new U.S. senator and other office holders amid the ongoing the pandemic.
“Because of COVID-19, we’re very concerned about our voters and poll workers. So the secretary of state and county officials decided we wanted to encourage vote-by-mail, and in Kansas, we’re lucky to have that option,” said Johnson County Election Commissioner Connie Schmidt.
“And since we don’t know what the pandemic is going to look like in the fall, we decided to go ahead and mail out forms for both elections.”
Election officials in Sedgwick County will be doing the same this week and plan on sending another round of applications in September. Douglas and Leavenworth Counties are also mailing applications to all voters, while election officials in other counties have sent postcards to voters explaining how to apply for a mail ballot.
Halfway through the year and still more than two months from the August primary, Kansas has already surpassed the total of mail ballot applications for the entirety of 2016 with 57,687 processed as of Friday morning, according to Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s office.
That’s more than 3,500 above 2016’s total and the figure will continue to increase as the election approaches.
Cowley County Clerk Karen Madison said she usually receives about 300 requests for primary mail ballots in the county in southern Kansas, but as of this week she’s already received more than 3,000, or roughly 15.1 percent of the county’s registered voters.
“I’m getting stacks of them every day,” she said earlier this month.
The embrace of mail voting in Kansas comes as it faces an increasingly hostile political environment. President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have denounced efforts to expand it during the pandemic, asserting without evidence that it heightens the potential for fraud. Thursday evening, in all caps, Trump tweeted:
“MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION....”
The perilous financial condition of the U.S. Postal Service could also create problems if Congress does not shore up its funding before the election. Trump has resisted the bipartisan push to bail out the independent agency.
Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from Michigan last week after the state mailed applications to every registered voter. He also falsely claimed this week that California is sending mail ballots to illegal immigrants
The president accused Twitter of interfering in the election after the social media company attached a rare fact check to two of his tweets about mail voting.
Despite his antipathy toward mail voting, Trump voted by mail in Florida’s presidential primary, where, like Kansas, the option is available to all voters.
Dale Ho, the director of American Civil Liberties Union’s voting rights project, noted that regardless of Trump’s rhetoric election officials from both parties have been working to expand mail voting during the pandemic.
“It’s interesting that he’s only criticizing some states like the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan but not Republican officials who have taken the exact same action in states like Ohio,” he said..
‘It’s simply an opportunity’
Schwab, the Johnson County Republican in his second year as Kansas’ top election official, wrote a letter to newspapers this month advising voters of their right to request a mail ballot. The Kansas secretary of state’s website has also been updated to allow voters to track the status of their mail ballot application.
“Kansas residents have a long and proud history of exercising their right to vote and many are being proactive in preparing for the 2020 elections,” said Katie Koupal, Schwab’s spokeswoman, attributing the increase applications in part to the outreach by county officials. Federal coronavirus aid for elections has also supported that effort.
Even though Kansas has allowed mail voting for any reason for nearly a quarter of a century and has remained GOP-leaning during that time, Kansas Republican Party officials are bristling at his aggressive efforts to expand the practice.
“What we’re concerned about is what we’re seeing happening in Leavenworth and Johnson: Counties mailing absentee applications to all voters. That raised our eyebrows,” said Shannon Golden, the executive director of the Kansas Republican Party. “Voting by mail is the single worst form of election possible.”
Golden said the party’s objections predate Trump’s opposition, and that Kansas Republican chairman Mike Kuckelman has raised the issue with Schwab. She said the party is fine with allowing voters to request mail ballots, but she contended that counties proactively mailing applications would decrease security.
Leavenworth County Clerk Janet Klasinski said that the county decided to mail out applications to every registered voter to ensure they are aware of a less risky option for voting during the pandemic. She rejected the notion that the use of mail ballots posed any additional risk to election integrity.
“My decision to mail out applications wasn’t to help a candidate or to hurt a candidate. It was to give people the opportunity to vote by mail,” Klasinski said. “It’s simply an opportunity if folks wanted to take advantage of that.”
Koupal, Schwab’s spokeswoman, said Kansas requires mail voters to provide their driver’s license number or other proof of identity. Their signature is also compared against what is on file at the county election office before their ballot is counted.
But Kansas Republic Party officials remain wary of increased mail voting. Golden raised particular concerns about “Johnson, where we’re going to have a fight this year.”
Johnson County will feature some of the most competitive races for the Kansas Legislature and it’s also part of the only congressional district in the state held by a Democrat.
Ben Meers, the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, called voting by mail a common sense option during the pandemic.
“The fact that the Kansas GOP is bending over backwards to prevent mail-in voting is an alarming and transparent attempt to suppress voters in the 2020 election cycle,” Meers said in a statement.
“Voting is a right. The GOP knows Democrats are positioned to win in Johnson County and across Kansas - for them to single out a specific county is akin to singling out any specific group of people in politically-engineered voter suppression.”
As of Friday morning, Johnson, the state’s most populous county, accounted for the biggest raw total in applications with 8,425, according to data from Schwab’s office. Douglas and Sedgwick Counties were close behind with 8,066, and 7,332 respectively.
Small counties, big interest
But it’s actually the state’s smaller GOP-leaning counties where voters are requesting them at the highest rate. As of this week, 17 counties, most of which were rural, had processed mail ballot applications for 10 percent or more of their registered voters.
Trego County, a western Kansas county of less than 3,000 people, has had 24.6 % of its registered voters request mail ballots.
Republic and Sheridan, two other small rural counties, were close behind with 23.1 % and 19.1 % respectively, according to Schwab’s office. All three counties are part of the heavily Republican 1st Congressional District, currently represented by Rep. Roger Marshall, a Republican running for U.S. Senate.
Marshall embodies the party’s conflicting sentiments on mail voting. During a virtual town hall on FOX 4 KC last week, he praised Kansas’ election system — which uses mail ballots widely — while also objecting to efforts to expand mail voting nationally.
Asked to clarify the congressman’s comments, Marshall’s spokesman Eric Pahls said in a statement that the congressman “supports local decision-making, and knows a national one-size-fits-all mail approach would be a disaster.”
Pahls added that Marshall “believes in the need for greater scrutiny into the entire mail-in process to ensure fraud and illegal harvesting are rooted out.”
Marshall’s top rival for the GOP nomination for Senate, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has also criticized efforts to expand mail voting nationally even though every election he oversaw during his two terms as the top election official featured the practice.
In a column for Breitbart, Kobach differentiated between mail voting in Kansas and other states because the state’s voter ID requirements still apply for mail ballots under a law he crafted.
Democrats from the region, however, have been vocal in their support for promoting mail voting during the pandemic.
Rep. Sharice Davids, a freshman Democrat whose district includes Johnson and Wyandotte Counties, said Trump’s threats to withhold funding from states over mail voting were dangerous and beyond inappropriate.
“Americans shouldn’t have to choose between their health and their vote, and I’ll continue to push for every eligible voter to be able to safely access the ballot box,” Davids said in an email.
Wyandotte County Election Commissioner Bruce Newby warned against efforts to make mail voting a partisan issue. The county sent postcards reminding voters of the option and reminding them how to apply.
“Politicizing vote-by-mail is unwarranted in Kansas and potentially unfortunate for voters. Kansas has provided for no-excuse early by mail or in-person voting for the past several decades,” Newby said in a statement. “In Kansas, this is deliberately called advance voting because it does not require any voter to give a reason they can’t vote on election day.”
Sarah Ritter reported from Kansas City.
This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
