Federal and state judges have dismissed all seven lawsuits filed by conspiracy theorists against Kansas election officials in an effort to change results for multiple recent elections, including the 2020 presidential election.
The most outrageous of the lawsuits, a federal claim filed in Kansas City, Kansas, asserted without evidence that voter machine manipulation was occurring in the state.
A group of election deniers from across the state asked for the 2020 presidential election be rendered void and redone, the elimination of existing voting machines, the elimination of drop boxes, the elimination of Kansas’ three-day grace period for advance ballots and for the launch of a criminal investigation into Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab.
A federal judge rejected the lawsuit on the grounds that it was outside his jurisdiction. The lawsuit focused on state laws, not federal laws. But in an earlier order, however, federal Judge Daniel Crabtree called the suit “long on suspicion, contingency, and hypothesis, but short on facts and identifiable harm.”
The suit was fueled by baseless claims of voter fraud promoted by former President Donald Trump after his loss in the 2020 election. Despite Trump winning Kansas by double digits in 2020, election denialists in the state have tried to undermine President Joe Biden’s win in Johnson County, a former Republican stronghold which has trended Democratic in recent years.
There is no evidence of widespread election fraud or irregularities in Kansas or nationwide.
“We have proven the integrity of the Kansas election system for four years. We appreciate the judges who sided with the facts,” Whitney Tempel, a spokeswoman for Schwab, said in a statement.
In addition to the federal ruling, state judges last week dismissed two other lawsuits last week that were aimed at the 2022 primary election in which Kansans overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed lawmakers to severely restrict or ban abortions.
Mark Gietzen, a Wichita anti-abortion activist who funded a partial recount of the landslide abortion vote, sued in Sedgwick County. Gietzen was seeking a full hand recount of the vote and a re-vote in areas with electronic voting machines, despite the recount affirming the ballot measure’s landslide defeat.
Joan Farr, who ran against U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran in the Republican primary, sought a reversal of the abortion vote and her primary contest.
Both suits were dismissed for lack of jurisdiction and failure to state a claim.
Gietzen said he plans to raise money to either file an appeal or an additional lawsuit.
The court defeats for election denialists in Kansas coincide with the electoral defeats last week across the nation for candidates who championed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Voters in Pennsylvania and Arizona, two states where Trump supporters sought to overturn Biden’s wins, rejected Republican gubernatorial candidates Doug Mastriano and Kari Lake, who had both backed Trump’s false claims about 2020.
