The renewal of the three-eighths-cent sales tax for public safety and infrastructure easily passed in Kansas City, Kansas, on Tuesday, Aug. 7.
The sales tax renewal was approved by 60 percent of the voters here, according to statistics from the Wyandotte County election office. The vote total was 10,226 “yes” and 6,594 “no,” according to a Wednesday vote total update on the election commissioner’s website.
“I think people realized it’s a critical tax with the community in terms of funding public safety and our neighborhood improvements,” said Mike Taylor, public relations director for the Unified Government.
“I think one of the selling points for it was that people from other communities from all over that come to The Legends and Village West are helping to pay for our police, fire and street and sidewalk improvements. For so many years, no one came to Wyandotte County, and Wyandotte County had to go outside the county to shop. Now we have people from all over the region coming, so they’re helping to contribute to pay for those services.”
Taylor said he was not disappointed with the 60 percent approval. The sales tax had received 70 percent approval about 10 years ago.
The sales tax this year had the endorsement of the Kansas City, Kansas, Area Chamber of Commerce and the NAACP.
There was some limited opposition to it on social media.
The current three-eighths-cent sales tax would expire in 2020. The sales tax renewal that was passed this year is expected to generate about $10 million a year, and would be in effect from 2020 to 2030.
The Wyandotte County election office did another vote run around 2:32 p.m. Wednesday afternoon that changed vote totals slightly here.
The votes were reported around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 7, as 10,484 “yes” and 6,801 “no.” However, in another vote run at 2:32 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 8, those totals changed to 10,226 “yes” and 6,594 “no” for the sales tax, according to the records posted on the Wyandotte County election office’s website.
The election office could receive additional mail ballots trickling in through the mail until Friday that may cause more changes to the totals. Vote totals also may change when provisional ballots are considered during the Wyandotte County election canvass, which was listed on a schedule for Aug. 16.
That new total vote count on Wednesday afternoon also changed counts for Republican candidates for governor in Wyandotte County, with incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer losing six votes here and challenger Kris Kobach losing 23 votes in Wyandotte County compared to the previous day’s total.
by Dan Margolies and Nicolas Telep, Kansas News Service
For the second time in two years, election night tabulation problems in Johnson County led to delays in voting results, leaving the outcomes of key races in limbo.
The problems occurred despite — or possibly because of — the county’s $10.5 million acquisition of new voting machines with paper ballots to replace its 15-year-old machines.
Johnson County Election Commissioner Ronnie Metsker told KCUR 89.3 that technicians from the machines’ manufacturer were brought in to work on the problems, “but unfortunately it has not functioned as it was reported that it should.”
“It’s been slow and tedious,” Metsker said. “We will get to the bottom of that. We trust them and we’re confident that this will be an excellent system once we get these bugs worked out.”
In 2016, Johnson County was the last county in the state to report its election totals. Metsker attributed the delay then to a software glitch in the tabulation software as well as a “huge influx” of advance mail ballots and voters registering for the first time or changing their registration.
The county’s 2016 vote totals didn’t get reported until about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, the day after the election.
This time around, Metsker said, the problems revolved around the uploading of data into the reporting software, which generates reports of the results.
In a statement released around 10 a.m. Wednesday, the Johnson County Election Office said that unofficial results were posted on its website shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday.
“We understand that the delay was frustrating to our community and agree that such delays are unacceptable,” the statement read. “Our first priority was reporting unofficial final results to our voters. We are working with the vendor to identify the cause of the delay, resolve the issue, and ensure the problem does not happen again.”
The vendor, Election Systems and Software, released a statement Wednesday afternoon attributing the delay in voting results to “slow processing of the election media on encrypted thumb drives.”
“Despite slower than normal processing,” it said, “the reporting is now complete, and the accuracy of the results was never in question.”
The company apologized for the slower than normal results and it was performing a forensic analysis “to identify the root cause of the slow results reporting.”
The snafus last night once again left the county, the state’s most populous, the last to tally its totals. That left the outcomes of the Republican primary for governor and the Democratic primary for the 3rd District congressional race up in the air until Wednesday morning.
In addition to tabulation problems, Metsker said turnout was unusually high for an August primary.
“So we had to make the call on what size this election would be back in May,” Metsker said. “That was even before the filing deadline of the candidates, and we projected to a capacity of 30 percent.
“You can see by the outcome that we did have somewhere in excess of 30 percent turnout and so there were some performance issues in terms of speed of service, uh, because we, we simply needed to have more capacity, meaning more machines and more election workers. That can be remedied by recruiting more workers and deploying more machines, but we simply did not expect to have this high turnout that we experienced.”
Metsker said the new machines performed very well in advance voting, “and everyone was raving about having the paper trail and how easy they were to use. … And then, of course, when we were doing the tabulation to see the system very, very slow, (we) were not expecting that. It was very, very disappointing.”
Metsker said he was confident the vendor would find out what went wrong, rectify it “and give us the surety that it will never happen again.”
“They are, of course, as bothered as anyone because they see their product not performing as expected,” Metsker said.
Gov. Jeff Colyer spoke with reporters Tuesday as his political future hung on the balance of a too-close-to-call primary with Secretary of State Kris Kobach. (Photo by Stephen Koranda, Kansas News Service)
by Scott Canon, Madeline Fox and Stephen Koranda, Kansas News Service
The moment that figured to clarify the Kansas race for governor instead left it muddled.
Sure, state Sen. Laura Kelly ended up running away with the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
And independent candidate Greg Orman had been waiting in the wings for months.
But the still oh-so-close Republican race between incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer and Secretary of State Kris Kobach tangled the race in the unknown.
Voters cast more than 300,000 ballots in the GOP primary. The unofficial total left Kobach ahead by 191 votes with an untold number of provisional and mail-in ballots yet to be added.
The two reliably conservative Republicans vowed Wednesday to put their energy behind whoever moves on to the general election. Kobach said he won’t let his campaign stall while waiting for the fuzzy primary to clarify itself.
But a protracted tallying of votes — and the possibility of the man in second place pushing for a recount — delays the usual consolidation of campaign firepower.
Fundraising is likely to falter when donors don’t know if they’re backing a potential winner or an already doomed loser. Talent won’t settle into a single campaign as quickly. Time spent picking apart the opposition could get eaten up by challenges to the primary vote count.
Laura Kelly (File photo)
Kelly dodged that limbo. Instead, she could tell reporters how either Republican will represent a continuation of the Sam Brownback years. By the time he left the governor’s office early this year, his unpopularity had Democrats upbeat about their chances of winning the race.
“I’m pumped and I’m ready to get busy working on the general election and winning in November,” Kelly said at a Democratic event in Topeka Wednesday. “We (will) get across that victory line. …I‘m confident.”
Yet her campaign faces particular dilemmas. Should its strategy, for instance, gear up for Kobach’s hard-line immigration stance and his talk of how politics in Topeka need some sledgehammering? Or does she position herself as the changemaker in opposition the more laconic Colyer and his constant references to how “the sun is shining in Kansas?”
A poll by Remington Research Group taken a few weeks before the primary showed her prospects against the polarizing Kobach — the candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump on the eve of the primary — better than if she takes on Colyer.
Kobach insisted he won’t let his campaign sit idle waiting for the final, deciding votes to trickle in.
Kris Kobach (Candidate photo)
“Unequivocally, we will be a unified party as we move forward. And if I do hand that baton to Jeff, I will hand that baton with as much momentum as we can,” he said. “But we have to start running right now, because our opponents have already started running.”
A few hours later, Colyer stood in front of reporters and struck a similar, Team Red tone. Republicans, he said, head toward November ready to fend off both Kelly and Orman by appealing to the state’s conservatives.
“It’s important that a Republican governor get elected in November,” the governor said. “I look forward to everybody being unified.”
Orman’s campaign issued a statement Tuesday after the primaries. Rather than address the newly confused dynamics of an already unpredictable three-way race, it attacked party politics.
Kelly and the ultimate Republican nominee, Orman said in the release, “will put party and the special interests that control them ahead of the Kansas people and this state for purely partisan gain.”
Amid all this is the ongoing vote counting. Mail-in ballots postmarked Tuesday or before and that arrive by Friday can be included. In addition, the secretary of state’s office said as many as 10,000 provisional ballots were cast. Local officials across the state won’t start to certify, or reject, those until Monday.
State law does not have a provision for automatic recounts. But a candidate can request one. The state pays for the cost of a recount in general elections races where the difference in votes between candidates is 0.5 percent or less. But in primaries, the campaign that demands a recount covers the cost.
A losing candidate would also have to gauge the political expense of extending a primary battle that could potentially cost his party the November election.
Colyer, at least, sent out a fundraising email Wednesday afternoon anchored on the possibilty of legal issues surrounding the vote count.
He told reporters Wednesday that he still believed the final tally could turn his way.
“Those votes that are outstanding clearly can change the … the outcome,” Colyer said.
But what about a recount?
“We’re not there yet,” Colyer said. “We need to get ready for the first count.”
Kobach’s secretary of state’s office oversees elections and will eventually certify the statewide result. He said Wednesday that he didn’t need to recuse himself from the process because county officials certify their results.
Chris Biggs, a former secretary of state, said Kobach has the choice of whether to step aside from the vote count. But he saw merit in finding an “independent referee” to maintain public confidence in the outcome.
“I would want to … see if there was a way to remove myself from the process,” Biggs said. “I would certainly want to make sure there was public trust in the process.”
(This story has been corrected to reflect who would pay for the cost of a recount.)
Scott Canon is digital editor of the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio covering health, education and politics. You can reach him on Twitter @ScottCanon.
Madeline Fox is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can reach her on Twitter @maddycfox.
Stephen Koranda is Statehouse reporter for Kansas Public Radio, a partner in the Kansas News Service. Follow him on Twitter @kprkoranda.
Kansas News Service stories and photos may be republished at no cost with proper attribution and a link back to the original post.
