Sedgwick County says it’s making steady progress on recount of abortion ballots

The Sedgwick County Election Office is on track to finish its recount by Saturday but is still looking for workers to help count nearly 150,000 votes on an amendment that sought to remove abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution.

By 3 p.m. Wednesday, with 60 election workers counting in bipartisan pairs, Sedgwick County had finished counting ballots from 25 out of 81 Election Day polling locations. The county had not started counting early in-person votes or advance ballots by mail.

Caudillo said she’s confident the recount will be completed by Saturday and may be completed as early as late Friday afternoon. Sedgwick County started counting at 7 a.m. and won’t finish for the day until 10 p.m.

“We’ll see how it goes today and see what we can get accomplished,” she said.

The recount is expected to continue from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursday.

“We’re holding big shifts to meet our deadline,” county spokesperson Nicole Gibbs said.

Statewide, the proposed “Value Them Both” amendment was rejected by a wide margin, 59% to 41%. It failed by more than 24,000 votes in Sedgwick County and more than 165,000 statewide. It was the nation’s first statewide referendum on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned decades-long federal protections in June.

Almost two hours into the recount Wednesday, a dozen teams had begun counting, with additional workers expected to trickle in throughout the day. By 3 p.m., the number of election workers had grown to 60 at the Sedgwick County Extension Center in west Wichita..

County election officials said they plan to have as many 100 Republicans and 100 Democrats involved in the recount.

The recount results must be certified by 5 p.m. Saturday. Sedgwick, the state’s second-largest county by population, started a day after Johnson County, where a couple dozen election workers began sorting ballots into piles by precincts on Tuesday morning. Sedgwick County is sorting ballots as they go.

Caudillo said Tuesday that the election office had plenty of Republicans interested in working the recount but not enough Democrats, Libertarians and unaffiliated counters to round out the 200-member special recount board.

“We have a lot of ballots to count, but that’s why we’re trying to get a big board,” she said Tuesday afternoon. “I don’t foresee any problems with completing by the deadline.”

Recounts are typically requested in close races and don’t usually result in the major changes that would be needed to pass the abortion constitutional amendment, which was placed on the Aug. 2 primary ballot by the state Legislature’s Republican supermajority.

In a last-minute fundraising drive, recount proponents were unable to raise enough money to trigger a statewide recount and instead targeted the Wichita area and eight other counties.

Anti-abortion activist Mark Gietzen and election denier Melissa Leavitt scraped up enough money to pay roughly $120,000 for the partial recount. If the outcome changes, they will be refunded. If not, the money will be distributed to the nine counties that recounted votes.

The other counties chosen for recounts are Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson, Lyon and Thomas (the only county selected where amendment supporters outnumbered opponents).

In Sedgwick County, counters will be compensated $7.50 an hour, Caudillo said.

She said it’s unlikely that a recount will change the outcome.

“I can’t foresee anything, necessarily (that would change the results),” Caudillo said. “But, again, that’s why the process exists: for people who have questions, people who want to initiate the process, they can request the recount.”

Caudillo said anyone interested in working as a counter should send an email that includes their name and party affiliation to voterinformation@sedgwick.gov.

Why a recount?

Gietzen, who has suggested without evidence that fraud occurred in the election, sued the secretary of state and county election officer to have drop boxes removed across the state before the vote on the amendment. The lawsuit was dismissed, but he said he plans to use any discrepancies that may surface in the recount to help his appeal.

In an interview, Gietzen acknowledged a recount likely won’t prove or disprove his theory that thousands of voters cast illegal ballots through the mail and ballot drop boxes as part of a massive ballot harvesting initiative, an unfounded idea he picked up from the debunked political movie “2000 Mules.” But it will test the voting tabulators used by the Sedgwick County Election Office.

“That’s the only way to make sure they’re not cheating with the algorithm, just to see if the computers are telling the truth or not,” he said. “The only way you can take the computer algorithm out of the picture is by doing the hand count.”

After that, he told The Eagle, he plans to start door-knocking in the counties where the recount was ordered to check whether voters live at the addresses where they were registered to vote on Aug. 2.

“I want to know if a human being voted,” he said. “And this is what we’re going to sample, maybe 10 out of every precinct. If I go out there and find, you know, 27 people that are supposed to be living in an abandoned house, that sort of thing, that’s what we want to be able to bring to the court.”

“I’ll promise you this,” Gietzen said. “If we get through this, and we find out everything was done perfectly accurate — nobody cheated, nobody did anything wrong, everybody that is on the list as having voted says, ‘Yes, I voted,’ I’ll accept the results.”