KS election committee spends thousands to hear QAnon wackos, billionaires’ wish list | Opinion

There’s an old cliche that says no one’s liberty is safe when the Legislature is in session.

Well, here in Kansas, we can go that one better.

Our state Legislature’s a threat to liberty, even when it’s out of session.

Case in point: The upcoming hearing of the 2023 Special Committee on Elections.

I’ve got the agenda for the hearing, and “special” is certainly one adjective that describes it — though not in a good way.

The committee is planning a full two days of hearings Sept. 28 and 29 to facilitate hours of crackpottery from conspiracy-minded election deniers, and smooth talk from hired guns representing billionaires who have their own interest in interfering with the election process.

The star witnesses for the hearing come primarily from two groups, the “Liberty Lion League” and the “Foundation for Government Accountability.”

Lions of Q Anon?

The Liberty Lions are the Kansas version of a national group that peddles discredited conspiracy theories and claims Donald Trump won the 2020 election, bigly.

In 2022, the group submitted those claims in a report to the Kansas Legislature that was long on speculation and practically devoid of actual evidence of voting fraud.

It uncritically quoted thoroughly discredited theories from such election experts as “My Pillow” guy Mike Lindell, former infomercial producer and treasure hunter Jovan Pulitzer, and of course, Fox News, which recently paid a $787 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems to avert an ugly court case over the network’s repeated lies about the company’s voting machines.

The leader of the Kansas Lions is Greg Shuey, a former Air Force pilot from Johnson County who wrote in the report that when he retired, “I was extremely dismayed to see Marxism come out from the closet and seep into then take over my country. To do what little I could, I started writing newsletters to enlighten family and friends, and eventually anyone who would listen, to what I was learning in constantly reading and analyzing history and political trends.”

In 2022, a report in the Kansas Reflector quoted Shuey at a Topeka church meeting peddling the ridiculous QAnon conspiracy theory known as “Italygate,” which claimed the 2020 election was stolen via satellite by operatives of an Italian software company working out of the U.S. Embassy in Rome with assistance from the Vatican.

That’s credibility!

Also speaking on behalf of the Liberty Lions:

▪ Tore Maras, a QAnon podcaster who ran as an independent for Ohio secretary of state in 2022. She collected 5,010 signatures in an election requiring 5,000 to get on the ballot, many of which were challenged by the state Republican Party because of incorrect or incomplete addresses and mismatching signatures. In court, her lawyer argued that those things don’t matter, (My what an odd crop of election integrity advocates we’re growing this year). The court ruled Maras’ candidacy could go forward and she got 1% of the vote.

▪ Mark Cook, the Lions’ national IT expert, who was involved in a lawsuit filed by the Colorado secretary of state last year alleging Cook and another individual provided equipment and advice to help a county election official make illegal copies of voting data.

▪ Thad Snider, a Lions’ “investigator” who has previously advocated to the Legislature for all elections to be conducted by paper ballots, hand-counted.

▪ Bernie Rieter, qualifications unknown. A Google search on the name gets only one hit, a guy in Bolton, New York who signed a zoning petition in 2014. I’m guessing its not the same Bernie.

Billionaires unite!

So let’s take a look at the other elephant in the room, the Foundation for Government Accountability.

The foundation is fueled with millions of dollars from right-wing billionaire donors across the county, all part of a network — including our own Koch Industries — that exists to increase corporation profits, widen the income gap between rich and poor and make the lives of disadvantaged people more miserable than they already are.

Among the foundation’s chief priorities are fighting Medicaid expansion, loosening and eliminating public-protecting regulations on businesses, relaxing child-labor laws and cutting tax exemptions for those pesky community hospitals.

On voting issues, they say they’re fighting “to stop outside influence on our elections,” which they somewhat ironically express by coming in from the outside and attempting to influence our elections.

The election committee will be hearing from two of their representatives: Nick Adolphsen of Maine, the foundation’s state government affairs director, and Steven Greene, a Wichita contract lobbyist representing 25 other business and interest groups at the statehouse.

The committee will also hear from Keith Esau, a former legislator and House Election Committee chairman, who wants to end the three-day grace period that gives the post office time to deliver legitimate ballots that are postmarked by Election Day.

Sadness and absurdity

There’s a sad component to this and an absurd one.

Let’s take the sad part first.

There are 105 counties in this state and every one of them seems to have taken Frank Sinatra to heart and does it their way.

Your voting rights should never be contingent on where in the state you live, but there it is.

This state can’t even decide on a consistent method for picking the people who run elections.

The four largest counties — Sedgwick, Johnson, Shawnee and Wyandotte — have an election commissioner appointed by Secretary of State Scott Schwab. Everywhere else, elections are run by an elected county clerk.

There’s certainly room for improvement, but it should go in the direction of making it easier for Kansans to vote, not harder like the Legislature does every time it touches the process.

Like the Sedgwick County Commission, which recently voted to stop sending voters advance ballot applications, the state Legislature’s justification for their actions is a purported loss of public confidence in elections.

Well, maybe everyone’s confidence would increase if our politicians addressed real issues, instead of listening to weirdos and ax grinders with fairy-tale theories about elections and who shot JFK. I know mine would.

The absurd part is what it’s costing to put on the hearing, which I would call a dog and pony show, but that would be an insult to dogs and ponies.

The cost to get the lawmakers to Topeka is a few dollars shy of $6,600, including salary at $88.66 a day, $157 per lawmaker per day for “subsistence,” and mileage from their home to the capitol at 66.5 cents per mile.

With 11 lawmakers on the committee, that averages out to $600 each — though mileage varies depending on how far they have to travel.

Personally, I could think of better ways for the state to spend our money than putting 11 people in a small room at the capitol to listen to two days of QAnon flakes and the billionaire boys’ club telling us how to run elections.

Maybe that’s just me.