Taxpayer dollars will likely be spent on the voter-imposed recount of Kansas’ landslide abortion rights ballot initiative.
Wichita anti-abortion activist Mark Gietzen and Colby election denier Melissa Leavitt put up a roughly $120,000 bond Monday to cover the cost of a full hand recount in nine of Kansas’ 105 counties.
The cost was established by estimates provided by county election offices to Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s office. If a county exceeds its estimate, however, the county government will be responsible for covering the difference.
Two of the nine counties say they have already exceeded their estimates, or expect to do so by Saturday.
The recount, which began Tuesday and must be finished by Saturday, is virtually guaranteed to fail in changing the outcome of the election. Kansans rejected the amendment 59% to 41%, a gap of more than 165,000 votes.
Nevertheless, it has resulted in extra work for election officials and additional costs for some counties.
Lyon County Clerk Tammy Vopat said the county, which completed its recount Wednesday, had not kept below their $480 estimate. She did not say how far off the county was.
Johnson County, the state’s most populous county, is still midway through its count but county spokeswoman Theresa Freed said in an email Thursday that the county expected to exceed its $74,500 estimate.
Sedgwick County’s election office does not yet know what the recount effort will cost in the state’s second most populous county. The office gave the state a $31,800 estimate.
Election officials in Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson and Thomas counties said they expected to stay within their cost estimates, while Douglas and Shawnee county officials said it is too early to know.
As of Thursday morning, Johnson County was still sorting ballots and preparing to recount Thursday afternoon. Rather than recruit additional volunteers for the process, the county pulled in 87 employees from 14 departments across the county government.
The county is aiming to recount all 256,869 ballots by Friday afternoon.
Johnson County Election Commissioner Fred Sherman said Monday his staff had already been working 10-12 hour days non-stop since early July.
“This is almost like doing an ‘Ironman’ triathlon and having to add on another marathon at the end. It is quite a gargantuan process,” Sherman said.
In Sedgwick County, a handful of county employees were diverted from their normal duties to recounting ballots, but their hours will be included in the county’s recount cost. The county held the recount at a county-owned building – a 4-H conference room at the Sedgwick County Extension Center.
Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Angela Caudillo said Wednesday morning that she was averaging less than four hours of sleep a night while scrambling to organize a recount and juggle her other duties, including a post-election audit.
By 3 p.m. Wednesday, with 60 election workers counting in bipartisan pairs, Sedgwick County had finished counting ballots from 25 out of 81 Election Day polling locations. The county had not started counting early in-person votes or advance ballots by mail.
Caudillo said she’s confident the recount will be completed by Saturday and may be completed as early as late Friday afternoon.
“We’ll see how it goes today and see what we can get accomplished,” she said. Sedgwick County had workers counting from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday and expected to do the same Thursday.
“We’re holding big shifts to meet our deadline,” county and election office spokesperson Nicole Gibbs said.
