Will Kansas candidates and voters accept election results amid voting conspiracies?
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For Tabitha Lehman, the prospect of not running an election office at the moment is freeing.
As voters began to cast their ballot, Lehman said election officials carrying out the November general election will face an even tougher task than when she served as elections commissioner in Sedgwick County.
Some Republican officials, such as Secretary of State Scott Schwab, have maintained that Kansas elections are secure and such tools as drop boxes are not vehicles for fraud. Many — but not all — elected officials have said they will accept the results of the Nov. 8 election.
But for Lehman, the damage has already largely been done.
Much as she moved into the private sector as an election administration consultant, other local election officials have become fed up with the rhetoric and left their posts over the past year, meaning the state will be increasingly relying on inexperienced replacements as voters head to the polls
"I am concerned that the detrimental impacts will be seen in the loss of knowledge and experience in election officials," she said. "And that will have that trickle-down effect that will impact all voters in those jurisdictions and across the state."
More:Judge denies longshot effort to stop use of Kansas ballot drop boxes, voting machines
The signs of mistrust in elections have not been hard to find in Kansas in recent months. Last month, a longshot lawsuit laden with baseless theories was filed in federal court, seeking to overturn past Kansas election results.
And some of those same conspiracy theorists paid for a recount of the Aug. 2 primary vote on a proposed anti-abortion amendment to the Kansas Constitution, despite its overwhelming defeat.
Even if statewide candidates do accept the results of the November election, the question remains — will voters?
"This would have seemed silly for someone like (Republican gubernatorial nominee) Derek Schmidt, I even think four years ago," said Davis Hammet, director of the voter engagement group Loud Light. "But now we're in a really different place. And I'm not sure where we go from here. What happens?"
Will Kansas candidates accept the 2022 election results?
Republican candidates in other states, notably Kari Lake, the party's nominee for governor in Arizona, have not said whether they will accept the results of the November election, raising fears that some will mirror former President Donald Trump's reaction to his defeat in 2020.
In Kansas, however, candidates have been more forthcoming.
Schmidt, speaking with reporters after an event at a Topeka farm implements dealer Tuesday evening, said he would "of course" accept the election results on Nov. 8.
"I'm not sure why that is a question," he said.
His opponent, Gov. Laura Kelly, has said she would accept the election results and told reporters Tuesday after casting her own ballot at the Shawnee County Elections Office that she was doubtful any meaningful effort to challenge the results would take hold.
"I'm sure there will be people scattered across the state of Kansas people who don't like the results and therefore not accept them in their own mind," Kelly said. "But I don't expect there to be any legal delay in announcing the results."
Kris Kobach, the Republican nominee for attorney general, has garnered criticism for stoking fears in 2020 that the election was stolen from Trump, including to help craft a Texas lawsuit seeking to block the certification of election results in several key swing states, a lawsuit Schmidt and at least Congressional Republican from Kansas, U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, supported.
But speaking at a news conference earlier this month, Kobach said he would "absolutely" accept the election results, "short of there being obvious fraud or something like that."
Others, however, have been more reticent.
Sen. Dennis Pyle, a Hiawatha independent running for governor, said he will only accept the results following the completion of a "full forensic audit."
More:Audits, voting machines and TikToks: Mistrust sparks GOP race to be Kansas' top election official
There is no provision in state law for such a process, which determines if election results are considered normal or a statistical outlier. Such audits have been conducted in other states and municipalities nationally and have determined few election errors, despite their promotion by Trump and his allies.
Pyle has requested the legislature's nonpartisan auditing arm conduct a review of the 2020 election, but state law only requires a more limited audit of randomly selected federal, state and local races.
"Upon completion of a full forensic audit, I will accept the results when it is demonstrated no unlawful votes were cast," Pyle said. "The people want to know their vote is secure, and no vote has been suppressed."
In the runup to elections, Kansas election officials hit with criticism and records requests
Election officials have long come face-to-face with critics who question their actions or the validity of the elections they run.
Lehman pointed to a range of lawsuits she faced as commissioner, notably a failed effort in 2015 from a Wichita mathematician to obtain ballot records in order to investigate alleged anomalies in the 2014 election.
But there is little doubt that this has become more frequent in recent years — even since the Aug. 2 primary, when election deniers put a $119,000 tab on a credit card to bankroll a recount of the abortion constitution amendment, which changed only 63 votes.
More:Kansas abortion amendment recount wraps up. After $119,000 spent, 63 votes changed.
A subsequent lawsuit from many of those same individuals seeks to re-do the 2020 and 2022 elections, something not provided for in state law, arguing without evidence the state was using improper electronic voting machines.
And, as part of a national trend, purveyors of election misinformation have hit state and local officials with a range of open records requests, some seeking to obtain obscure or proprietary information.
The plaintiffs of the longshot lawsuit, as well as individuals who have testified in support of conspiracy theories before the state Legislature, have filed over a dozen records requests with the Kansas Secretary of State's office since January.
Several other requests mirror those filed elsewhere in the country seeking cast vote records, or an electronic record of a voter's ballot selections. It cannot be used to detect voting patterns and experts say it is not particularly useful for laypeople.
Counties have seen a similar trend.
Wyandotte County has seen 12 KORA requests since the Aug. 2 primary; in Shawnee County that number has been around 20.
While some county elections officials have said the volume of requests have been a hindrance ahead of the general election, Shawnee County Elections Director Andrew Howell said it was manageable. The most voluminous requests, he noted, were from larger out-of-state law firms or groups requesting provisional ballot records.
Even though they take time to respond, Howell said he took records requests and questions from election skeptics as a chance to educate.
"It takes time — I mean, it does," he said. "There's no running from that. If you have a lot of people coming in with those kinds of questions, it takes time to do it. But I worry that people will feel like we either have something to hide or don't care. And I think those are two things that I don't want people to feel. Because I do care. I do care that we do it right, that we follow the law and the questions get answered."
But sometimes, Lehman said, voters will repeatedly seek documents that cannot be obtained under the state's open records law, filing a new request as soon as a denial comes in.
And when officials are working 80-hour weeks, every additional task takes time away from other election administration duties.
"There comes a point in time where it becomes ridiculous," she said.
Kansas Republicans toe the line on election integrity issues
As Kansas Republicans kicked off a statewide bus tour, designed to rally their base with red meat attacking Joe Biden, Kelly, inflation and other topics designed to gin up conservative support at the polls, Secretary of State Scott Schwab had a message for attendees on what he didn't want them to talk about.
Schwab has long made headlines for declaring the integrity of Kansas elections, as well as ballot drop boxes, a tool often criticized by other conservatives, despite no evidence they are a vehicle for fraud.
He successfully beat back a primary challenge from a far-right former Johnson County Commission member, Mike Brown, and is heading into a general election matchup with Democrat Jeanna Repass on Nov. 8.
"You came through a primary where we were challenged on the integrity of election and someone was manipulated to put $118,000 on their personal credit card for a recount, to prove that our clerks and our Republican system of administering elections work," Schwab said. "Winners are still winners. The losers were still losers and we move forward."
Republican turnout, he said, was depressed when talk shifted to election fraud. There is some evidence of this; research has found individuals who shared social media posts promoting conspiracy theories to be less likely to vote.
In Kansas, most voters say they are confident in election integrity.
Roughly 69% of those surveyed in a recent Fort Hays State University poll said they strongly or somewhat agreed that they were confident the candidates who receive the most votes in Kansas elections are ruled the winner; 16% said they thought fraud was a problem in the state's elections.
More:Kris Kobach's 'cop killers' ad includes footage from Tiger Woods DUI arrest
But election issues have not been a major topic of debate between the two candidates in the governor's race, even though Schmidt signed onto the 2020 Texas lawsuit, a move he has defended as "the right legal decision" because he believed other states ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution when election procedures were modified without legislative approval.
Hammet, the director of Loud Light, said he was surprised Kelly has not made more of that issue on the campaign trail, calling it a worrying sign for democracy.
"That's a pretty concerning use of money," he said. "I'm surprised that hasn't played bigger. ... I expected to see some ads about that."
When asked if he condemned rhetoric disavowing ballot drop boxes and electronic voting machines, Schmidt said he has long held that "Kansas elections overall are solid" and that the Legislature had done a good job in updating the state's election laws.
"I think all of these are worthy discussions to have," he said. "But I think they do need to be done in a way that is thoughtful and focused on data and strengthening public policy."
U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said from his experience traveling the state that it was clear local election officials were increasingly under strain — and while he said the trend predated Trump, it would also ultimately put democracy in Kansas at risk if not attended to.
Moran was the only Republican member of the state's Congressional delegation to vote to certify the 2020 election results. He is also on the ballot on Nov. 8, facing off against Democrat Mark Holland and, without prompting, Moran said he would accept the results in his own election.
"Our country will be greatly harmed if we get to the point in which an election is not something that we can believe," Moran said.
Still, these comments have not been enough for someone like Lehman, who said she had been a lifelong Republican — until earlier this year, when she said she left the party over what she views as an inadequate response from elected officials to put down the misinformation.
"There always has been noise and there was noise after 2016, where a lot of people were convinced that Hillary didn't lose," she said. "But nothing like this. Nothing like this. This is a whole different ballgame, where you have a political party that is not willing to stand up for what is actually true and say: 'Enough already. This is not true. This did not happen.'"
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Will Kansas candidates accept the 2022 election results?
