Johnson County abortion vote holds steady with recount. One Kansas county still to finish
Johnson County finished its recount of Kansas’ landslide abortion vote Saturday, revealing no significant changes in outcome and affirming the county’s overwhelming support of state level abortion rights.
The county’s canvass board convened Saturday morning to announce and certify the official results of the hand recount. Sedgwick County is the final remaining county to release its official recount results, and the county has not set a time to certify their results.
In total 38 votes changed, a minuscule fraction of the more than 250,000 ballots cast in Johnson County.
The county counted 18 fewer yes votes and 20 fewer no votes than the original count, said election commissioner Fred Sherman. The county still rejected the amendment by more than 95,000 votes.
“There’s a lot of people that have put in a lot of emotion and anxiety,” Sherman said. “There was probably some human elements done in these mismatched numbers because of a compressed timeframe that you have to complete the task in.”
Johnson County’s results further confirm the recount is unlikely to result in any significant changes to the vote that affirmed abortion rights in Kansas. Kansans rejected the proposed constitutional amendment, which would have stripped the right to an abortion from the state constitution, 59% to 41%. The gap was more than 165,000 votes.
Mark Gietzen, a Wichita anti-abortion activist, and Melissa Leavitt, a Colby election denier, scraped together around $120,000 Monday to force a hand recount of the abortion rights affirming vote in nine counties. The counties accounted for nearly 60% of the vote.
Leavitt and Gietzen made unfounded and vague claims of election fraud. Unable to pay for a recount in the entire state, they chose Kansas’ two largest counties, Johnson and Sedgwick, as well as Douglas, Shawnee, Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson, Lyon and Thomas.
Every county but Johnson and Sedgwick finished their recounts by Friday.
Data from the counties and the Kansas Secretary of State’s office showed minimal changes in the seven counties that finished by Friday. Seven additional yes votes were recorded in the count, and one less no vote was recorded.
The changes represent less than a quarter of a percent of the nearly 154,000 ballots recounted in those seven counties.
Sedgwick County was originally scheduled to hold its canvass at 8 a.m. Saturday but postponed it at the last minute.
The county has not said what happened, but Sedgwick County Commissioner Jim Howell shared a text with The Wichita Eagle that he received from County Manager Tom Stolz at 8:40 p.m. Friday saying Sedgwick County would miss the Saturday deadline for finalizing recount results due to an unspecified error.
“Proofreading our results, I found some things that I just wasn’t 100 percent comfortable with and I wanted to make sure and get it right,” Caudillo is quoted as saying in the text from Stolz.
“She has already notified the secretary of state that she will miss the deadline. She did not divulge what the problem was,” Stolz told commissioners.
The county has not yet scheduled a new canvass date.
This story was originally published August 20, 2022 at 11:28 AM.
