Kansas candidates focus on voter fraud, but errors most likely cause of election problems
When Republican Mike Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner, launched his campaign for Kansas secretary of state earlier in this month, he listed the reasons voters should question incumbent Scott Schwab’s commitment to election security.
Among them were two November races in Rice County, tossed because of “election irregularities.”
Just weeks into the Republican primary for secretary of state, the race is already dominated by questions of election security, an issue driving state-level races across the country..
Baseless allegations of voter fraud by former President Donald Trump and his allies have fueled widespread doubts among GOP voters about the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s victory and undercut their overall confidence in elections.
That has led candidates in some races to raise their own often vague and questionable concerns about “election integrity.” In Kansas, where former Secretary of State Kris Kobach made his name looking for — and finding very few — fraudulent votes, Brown and Schwab are clamoring for advantage on the issue.
Brown, who lost his 2020 reelection bid to the county commission but did not challenge the results at the time, says Schwab hasn’t done enough to keep Kansas elections secure. Schwab, who challenged Trump’s attacks on the integrity of the election system in 2020, is touting voter ID measures he promoted in the Legislature and created a new online form to report fraud.
But when election problems arise in Kansas, it’s often because of administrative errors or fuzzy rules – not fraudulent voters.
In central Kansas’s Rice County, simple human error was to blame.
The county election administrator, Aurelia Garcia, only in her second year on the job, mistakenly instructed voters in a city council race to pick three candidates rather than two. She also failed to send ballots for a school district ballot question to 30 voters in a neighboring county. A judge ordered new elections, according to court records.
“It was just a mistake due to pure ignorance really,” Garcia said. “There was no mal-intent involved.”
Garcia said she’s receiving support from the Secretary of State’s Office and the state association of election clerks to prevent future mistakes.
A few years earlier, in the 2018 primary for governor, Johnson County suffered slow election-night reporting of unofficial results. In the same election, Sedgwick County’s canvassing board approved 14 ballots cast by voters attempting to register with a political party who didn’t properly fill out a form. Johnson County rejected 35 ballots with the same problem, illustrating the inconsistent standards sometimes applied across the state.
Questioned by The Star, Brown doubled down on his criticism of Schwab, calling for a statewide election audit and saying the secretary had failed to support election administrators.
“Under his failed leadership we have seen the removal of elections standards with the Secretary telling counties seeking direction, to turn to their county attorneys for election guidance and advice — many of whom have no background in election law,” Brown said in an email.
Schwab did not respond to The Star’s request for comment but has been vocal on the question of election security in recent weeks.
Schwab’s campaign has said that the secretary is “working hard to defend your right to vote securely and safely” rather than play party politics.
The secretary has consistently said Kansas has secure elections. But he did not oppose legislative efforts last year to block outside dollars from state election offices or limit the number of ballots Kansans could return on behalf of other residents. Those measures are now the subject of state and federal lawsuits.
Tabitha Lehman, former longtime election commissioner in Sedgwick County, said in her experience problems with elections are almost always the result of mistakes rather than fraud.
Even in cases of non-citizens voting in the county, the vast majority were able to cast ballots because Department of Motor Vehicles clerks mistakenly offered them the chance to register, she said.
Lehman ran elections in Sedgwick County until earlier this year after Schwab chose not to reappoint her. A public dispute played out over why she wasn’t reappointed, with Schwab’s office alleging she improperly accessed a voter registration network at home. Lehman said she was working from home because of cancer treatments and had used a secure connection.
Election administrators have been given a growing number of tasks where perfection is expected but without additional resources, Lehman said.
“Everybody’s underfunded and this is way too important to let that stand,” she said. “And it should be bipartisan, funding these properly should be a bipartisan thing.”
‘You can’t fix a unicorn’
Davis Hammet, president of the Kansas-based civic engagement group Loud Light, said before the 2020 election state legislators had been advancing incremental improvements to election laws. Kobach’s signature measure, which required Kansans to show proof of citizenship to register to vote, had been struck down after a federal trial, leaving some legislators chastened.
But the 2020 election, with Trump’s repeated allegations of voter fraud, has refocused Republicans on the issue, despite the lack of evidence.
“If we don’t have an actual stated problem, you can’t fix a unicorn,” Hammet said. “You can’t fix something unless you’re actually pointing to what the problem is.”
Hammet said he’s worried about the impact of the Schwab-Brown primary. While Schwab supported bills Hammet says promoted voter suppression, he was trying to clean up “an office on fire” that he inherited from Kobach.
But with Brown entering the race, “now it’s going to be this just who can be the most bombastic” about unsubstantiated claims of fraud, Hammet predicted.
“Scott Schwab’s kind of in a pickle in that he is in charge right now and he needs to establish that things are run well,” said Rep. Vic Miller, a Topeka Democrat who sits on the House Elections Committee. “On the other hand, there’s a hue and cry among some that things need to be changed.”
Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, a Galena Republican who has pushed for more election security measures , said he wants to pursue legislation ensuring paper versions of every ballot, a clear chain of custody and watermarks for authenticity.
Hilderbrand acknowledged that those measures would not solve administrative hangups that caused the Rice County issues.
“Sometimes it’s not fraud, sometimes it’s human error and a lot of times you find out it’s human error,” he said.
But, Hilderbrand said the lack of clear evidence of widespread voter fraud in Kansas shouldn’t prevent the state from doing more to prevent it.
“You always have to approach it as there is until you can prove otherwise,” Hilderbrand said. “There are people somewhere always trying to game the system.”
