Tag: Kansas secretary of state

Schwab’s campaign rebuffs election-integrity criticism from Kansas GOP rival Brown

Questions of security of voting process permeate race for secretary of state

by Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector

Topeka — The campaign of Secretary of State Scott Schwab pushed back Tuesday against Republican primary challenger Mike Brown’s attempt to blame the GOP incumbent for election administration mistakes in Rice and Douglas counties.

“Once again,” said Lydia Meiss, of the Schwab campaign, “Mike Brown is misrepresenting the facts for political gain, and fails to understand the role of the secretary of state’s office in election administration.”

Brown, a former Johnson County Commission member, has waged a campaign for secretary of state anchored to President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of 2020 election fraud and to allegations Schwab fell short in his role as the state’s top elections officer.

In texts to supporters, Brown touted a news story of the recent Kansas Court of Appeals decision declaring Schwab violated the Kansas Open Records Act. The appellate court said Schwab shouldn’t have instructed a company to switch off a computer software feature that made it easier for the public to access provisional ballot data.

Brown, of Overland Park, tried to link Schwab to mistakes by the Rice County clerk regarding inaccurate instructions to voters in a city council election and failure to forward two-dozen ballots to voters in a school ballot initiative. He suggested Schwab was responsible for a problem in Douglas County in which a printing company created duplicate ballots. Cards were sent to about 1,000 voters and local officials said procedures were in place to block double-voting.

Meiss, deputy campaign manager for Schwab, said Brown should be aware administrative mistakes would occur in the election process and often those situations were beyond jurisdiction of a secretary of state in Kansas. That was the case in Douglas and Rice counties, she said.

“The election administrative errors occurred at the local level, for a local election, where the secretary of state has no statutory authority to intervene,” she said. “Secretary Schwab has made it a priority to provide additional and enhanced training, resources and a training certification program to county election officials, beyond what is already required in state law. He will continue to do so in his second term.”

Schwab, who served Olathe in the Kansas House from 2009 to 2019, was elected secretary of state in 2018. He is seeking reelection to a second term and has repeatedly declared Kansas elections safe and secure.

Schwab was endorsed for reelection by former Gov. Sam Brownback and former U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, who praised Schwab for increasing post-election audits, improving security of election equipment and opposing attempts by the federal government to take greater control of Kansas elections.

Brown, who lost a 2020 reelection campaign for Johnson County Commission, has faced criticism for praising an $856,000 grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to support Johnson County’s election operation in 2020. The money was part of Facebook executive Mark Zuckerberg’s initiative to offer grants to local governments struggling with challenges of COVID-19, and some conservatives have objected to infusion of that outside cash.

Schwab’s campaign issued a statement that said the secretary of state didn’t accept Zuckerberg funding, but questioned Brown’s decision to support the county’s use of that grant money.

Schwab’s campaign also accused Brown of accepting thousands of dollars in anonymous online donations in excess of amounts allowed by state law.

“Mike talks a lot about integrity. It’s just that — all talk,” the Schwab campaign said. “Time and time again, Mike failed to act with integrity. He didn’t act with integrity when he was county commissioner and he’s already proven that he won’t as secretary of state.”

On Tuesday, Brown turned to Facebook to question Schwab’s skills because the word “integrity” was misspelled on a state website listing of political organizations. The campaign-finance reporting site operated by the secretary of state’s office and the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission listed the Election Integrity organization as “Election Integrety.”

“Our failed Kansas secretary of state, ‘Skippy’ Schwab, knows so little about election integrity he can’t even spell it,” Brown said. “It would be funny if it weren’t so shameful.”

Kansas Reflector stories, www.kansasreflector.com, may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
See more at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/07/26/schwabs-campaign-rebuffs-late-campaign-criticism-from-kansas-gop-rival-brown/

Kansas court says the secretary of state violated open records law and made it hard to get documents

by Celia Llopis-Jepsen, KCUR and Kansas News Service

The Republican secretary of state asked a private company to shut off a software function that makes it easy to retrieve certain public information.

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab broke state law by taking action to prevent provisional ballot information from becoming public, the state’s second-highest court ruled on Friday.

The judges said that Schwab, a Republican, told a private company in 2020 to shut off a software feature that gave his office easy access to provisional ballot data and which, by extension, allowed the public to request the information.

So the company — which stores the Kansas statewide voter registration database — turned off the function at his request.

A three-judge panel unanimously concluded that the Kansas Open Records Act, or KORA, doesn’t allow Schwab to do that.

“That action — choosing to conceal rather than reveal public records — violates KORA,” Kansas Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Hill wrote.

A spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office said Friday that staff were reviewing the court ruling. The office has 30 days to appeal.

The ruling defends the public’s right to access government records, said Steve Leben, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and former judge on the Kansas Court of Appeals for 13 years.

“It’s definitely good news for the public,” Leben said, because it upholds what the Legislature made clear in its open records law. “(The Legislature) said directly in the open records act, that act is to be liberally construed to promote openness of public records.”

The backstory to Friday’s ruling starts in 2019.

That’s when Davis Hammet, founder of the Kansas civic engagement group Loud Light, requested provisional ballot information from the state.

His group wanted to know who had cast provisional ballots in the 2018 general election. Loud Light uses provisional ballot information to contact voters and let them know what steps they need to take to make sure that their vote ultimately gets counted.

Voters have to cast provisional ballots in certain situations. For example, if they have moved to a new address but forgot to report the address change to the county clerk, then election workers are unable to verify at the polling site whether the person is a valid voter. So the voter gets to cast a provisional ballot.

Voters who cast provisional ballots may need to take additional steps in order for their vote to count. For example, they may need to show a valid government-issued ID card.

The secretary of state’s office denied Hammet the provisional ballot records. Hammet sued and a district court agreed that the records should be public and ordered Schwab to release them.

So Schwab’s office handed over the records.

But in August 2020, Schwab asked the private company that stores the records to switch off the software function that gives his office easy access to the data.

The next time Hammet asked for updated provisional ballot information, Schwab’s office told him it didn’t have access to the records anymore. It suggested Hammet should instead ask each of the state’s 105 counties individually to give him their provisional ballot information.

Schwab’s office said it couldn’t produce the information centrally anymore unless Hammet agreed to pay more than $500 to have a software expert spend three hours accessing the information through a more complicated process.

So Hammet tried to get the records by contacting all 105 counties, but most counties wouldn’t comply.

Hammet sued Schwab again.

Now the Kansas Court of Appeals rules Schwab violated the Kansas Open Records Act by instructing the private company to shut off the function that makes it easy for his office to view the provisional ballot information, and then telling Hammet he would now need to pay hundreds of dollars for information that used to be free.

“The secretary of state here directed his computer software vendor to turn off a computer report feature,” the court concluded. “By turning off the report capability, the secretary denied reasonable public access to that public record and the information within it.”

Hammet said Friday’s ruling “brings the Kansas open records law into the digital age.”

“It says, if you want to use a private data vendor to store records, that’s fine, but the people of Kansas still have a right to see those records,” Hammet said. “You can’t hide behind how you store the records to deny the people of Kansas … from looking at these things and making sure that the government is operating for the public good.”

Hammet first requested provisional ballot records when the 2018 Republican gubernatorial primary between Jeff Colyer and Kris Kobach came down to a narrow margin of victory and Johnson County had tossed out hundreds of ballots.

He says his persistent research into why some don’t get counted and pressure on officials to release public records that shed light on the reasons, have pressed counties and the state to improve.

In 2019, the Kansas Legislature changed state law to say local election officials must inform voters if they plan to toss out their ballots because they believe the voters’ signatures don’t match the signatures on file. This gives the voter the opportunity to prove their ballot was valid.

Schwab’s office has 30 days to appeal Friday’s decision to the Kansas Supreme Court. Otherwise, a district judge will order his agency to have the private vendor restore easy access to provisional ballot data, and then give Hammet the information.

Leben said Friday’s ruling is significant because court rulings on open records law aren’t frequent, and some aspects of how open records law applies in the real world remain murky.

“One of the situations in which the application of the open records act is unclear,” he said, “is the large amount of information that government stores on computers. And this case is significant because it involves a directive to make information on the computer easily accessible.”

At least, he said, the ruling applies to situations where the government takes action to make easily accessed database information harder to retrieve.

Celia Llopis-Jepsen is a reporter for the Kansas News Service. You can follow her on Twitter @celia_LJ or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
Kansas News Service stories and photos may be republished by news media at no cost with proper attribution and a link to ksnewsservice.org.
See more at https://www.kcur.org/news/2022-07-22/kansas-court-says-the-secretary-of-state-violated-open-records-law-and-made-it-hard-to-get-documents

Kansas election official urges legislators to avoid restricting drop boxes for advance ballots

by Noah Taborda, Kansas Reflector

Topeka — The Kansas Secretary of State’s Office and voting rights advocates are urging Senate lawmakers to reject a bill banning the use of drop boxes for advance ballots except under certain conditions.

With the pandemic raging, many counties chose to add additional drop boxes to increase ease of voting and maintain social distancing. These estimated 180 additional boxes are the target of many who fear the election could be vulnerable to interference from fraudsters.

Senate Bill 445 would prohibit the use of these boxes unless they are located inside the building of a county election office or satellite voting location. An employee must continuously observe the drop box during times that it is available to the public.

Clay Barker, general counsel for the secretary of state, said the proposed law was redundant as counties already supervise many boxes and that the law would hinder the state if more drop-off points were needed during a disaster.

“If I was doing ballot harvesting, which is now illegal in Kansas, I would not go near a drop box,” Barker said. “What we would like, if the committee wanted to move on drop boxes, is the direct authority to regulate them because right now, they are unregulated in Kansas.”

While they are unregulated, the Secretary of State’s Office has federal guidelines and its own policies helping direct counties on best practices. Policies include the requirement for a bipartisan group to pick up the ballots, the level of the sidewalk, and clearing brush away.

Still, the surveillance applied to these boxes is not uniform, leading to concerns among some legislators.

In 2020, Kansas saw the number of drop boxes increase by more than 180 in large part because of the secretary of state’s offer to purchase two additional boxes for every county. Seventy-nine counties requested two boxes and 12 requested one. Johnson County requested seven. At least eight counties purchased even more drop boxes on their own using federal grants.

Sen. Richard Hilderbrand, R-Galena, pointed out that while the desire may be for all counties to always have a man or a camera on these boxes, this is not the case everywhere. Camera security also cannot prevent the destruction of ballots in real time, only evidence to convict, he said.

“You keep saying these are the most secure because of surveillance but let’s just say they do have surveillance cameras on there, how often are they checked?” Hilderbrand said. “How often do people get to look at them? I can go in and drop 10 ballots off, and if it’s a low resolution, you don’t know if it’s 10 or I could drop 20 off.”

Aileen Berquist, community engagement manager for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, countered these concerns by reminding legislators there is no indication in Kansas that ballot drop boxes have or will be the subject of tampering. Reports from other states do not consider the verification process in Kansas, she said.

“We see this bill as a solution to a problem that is being manufactured,” Berquist said. “Ballot boxes provide much needed flexibility to voters in a busy modern world and that flexibility has been even more crucial to our civic engagement during a worldwide pandemic.”

Kansans must first request a ballot where they enter their driver’s license number and their signature, later checked by the election office, and then it must be taken to a box that is usually under surveillance, said Davis Hammet, of the election reform organization Loud Light. He said the vague writing of the bill could open the state up to litigation.

“There’s a whole chain of custody process for these ballots,” Hammet said. “The drop boxes might be actually one of the most secure ways to do this.”

Kansas Reflector stories, www.kansasreflector.com, may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
See more at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/02/18/kansas-election-official-urges-legislators-to-avoid-complicating-advance-ballot-drop-off/