Convicted clinic arsonist and vote recount observer has plan for our future elections

I don’t want convicted arsonists anywhere near our election ballots. I’m sure you don’t either.

But when you bend over backwards to try to accommodate anti-abortion extremists and Big Lie hardliners, that’s what you get.

For example: a woman named Jennifer McCoy was credentialed by Sedgwick County as an official observer of the recount of ballots cast on the anti-abortion Value Them Both amendment, which Kansas voters rejected 59%-41% on Aug. 2.

Last week, McCoy went before the County Commission floating a proposal for creation of a seven-member “Sedgwick County Citizens Commission for Election Security.”

McCoy, formerly known as Jennifer Patterson Sperle, is an anti-abortion fanatic who served a 30-month sentence in federal prison for trying to burn down two women’s clinics in Virginia.

Here’s what the Justice Department had to say about it on Nov. 4, 1996, the day she pleaded guilty:

A Wichita, Kansas woman . . . Jennifer Patterson Sperle, 24, entered a plea of guilty before the U.S. District Court in Norfolk. On December 13, 1994, Spearle (sic) placed a lit flare through the mail slot at the Peninsula Medical Center for Women. On March 6, 1996, she broke a window at the Tidewater Clinic, poured two gallons of kerosene throughout the clinic, and set it afire.

In a later statement, the DOJ said: “At the sentencing today, Sperle admitted to burning the facilities, acknowledged she was wrong, and denounced violence.”

But McCoy resurfaced in The Wichita Eagle in 2009 after Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, was shot to death at Reformation Lutheran Church.

McCoy visited the assassin, Scott Roeder, in jail and was a frequent attendee — as a supporter — at his court hearings and trial.

So much for denouncing violence.

Back then, she complained of lack of access because part of the jury selection was closed to the public.

At Wednesday’s commission meeting, she again was complaining of lack of access, this time because observers like her were told they could go home after the hand-count finished, “but they continued to do something for a day and a half.”

What actually happened was that election office workers who proof-read the results found some ballots that had been cast at advance voting sites had not been sorted into their proper precincts at the beginning of the recount.

A lawsuit by Mark Gietzen, a former Republican Party county chairman who now runs the Kansas Republican Assembly and Kansas Coalition for Life, says McCoy filed a criminal complaint against the election commissioner and her staff for working among ballots without the watchful eye of a convicted felon upon them.

And that’s just a sampling of what we can expect if these people are ever actually empowered to oversee an election.

The request for a citizens commission that McCoy brought to the county is flying under the banner of a heretofore unknown group calling itself “Americans for Integrity.”

The group appears to have no legal identity with the secretary of state’s office and no web presence. There’s no public disclosure of who’s in it, other than McCoy. A news release sent to The Eagle lists a Google Voice phone number that is unanswered and messages aren’t returned.

So much for integrity.

The group wants its “commission” to “have the authority to review all aspect the Kansas election process that impacts Sedgwick County” and to “be provided with meeting space that is reasonably located to required information and organizations involved in election processes.”

Even without the typos, that would be a hard “No.”

County Commission Chairman David Dennis was polite to McCoy and offered to forward the request to Secretary of State Scott Schwab, the state’s top election official, because the County Commission doesn’t have the authority to do what McCoy and her group want it to do.

That touched off an exchange of e-mails in which they argued with Dennis that the County Commission does have the authority and they don’t think Schwab would give them what they want.

After that, Dennis said “At this point, I am going to stay out of this.”

Good call, David.

We’ve been back and forth through the looking glass with these people for the last three weeks.

That’s more than enough.