Kansas recount confirms landslide win for abortion rights, but highlights risk to democracy

Kansas reaffirmed its landslide vote to uphold abortion rights after election officials on Sunday finished a recount that never had any chance of changing the outcome but was sought by an election denier and anti-abortion activist advancing baseless allegations of fraud.

The exercise instead delivered a second victory for opponents of an amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution.

But the recount of such a lopsided vote, rather than building credibility in the results, risks undermining trust in elections because the process provided fringe, diehard amendment supporters an opportunity to attempt to create an aura of uncertainty surrounding the vote when, in fact, none ever existed.

A hand recount in nine counties – including Johnson and Sedgwick, the state’s two largest – cost roughly $120,000 and burned countless hours as election officials scrambled to conclude the arduous process before a Saturday deadline. Kansas voters rejected the amendment, called Value Them Both by supporters, 59% to 41% with a margin of about 165,000 votes.

The partial recount ultimately changed the outcome by fewer than 70 votes —an infinitesimal fraction of the overall vote that included ballots from more than 922,000 Kansans.

Sedgwick County verified its results around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. The county missed the Saturday deadline, requesting an extension to review an apparent anomaly in the data — approximately 400 ballots had not been categorized by precinct. It was the last county to verify its recount.

“In this age of voter fraud hysteria it appears that no amount of evidence is enough to convince some people,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law.

The Kansas recount was requested last Friday by Melissa Leavitt, a Colby resident who has testified to the Kansas Legislature about 2020 election conspiracy theories. Baseless views about election fraud took hold nationally – including among some in Kansas – after President Donald Trump and his supporters falsely claimed the election was stolen.

Hasen said voter confidence has declined nationally as Trump and many other Republicans have continued to cling to false claims about the 2020 election for nearly two years.

Leavitt ultimately raised more than $50,000 online for the abortion recount, but her main benefactor was Mark Gietzen, a longtime anti-abortion activist from Wichita. Gietzen also leads the Kansas Republican Assembly, a hard-right alternative to the traditional Republican Party.

Leavitt originally requested a statewide recount, which Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s Office estimated would have cost about $230,000. Leavitt and Gietzen on Monday managed to put forward just under $120,000, with Gietzen using a credit card for the Kansas Republican Assembly and money from his own retirement account.

The amount was enough to order recounts of nine counties: Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, Douglas, Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson, Lyon and Thomas. The recount ultimately resulted in six additional yes votes and 57 fewer no votes, spread across the nine counties.

Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, the main group that opposed the amendment, hailed the results of the recount.

“Voters across the political spectrum want to protect the constitutional rights and freedom of women to make private medical decisions for themselves. We hope that lawmakers will now listen to the voters and take NO for an answer,” Ashley All, the group’s spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The Aug. 2 election was — and is — a landslide victory for abortion rights supporters. Kansas was the first state to vote on abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court in June overturned Roe v. Wade. President Joe Biden and national Democrats quickly seized on the outcome as evidence that voters broadly support abortion rights and will vote on the issue.

The election also produced extraordinary turnout for a primary election. About 48% of registered voters cast a ballot.

Leavitt’s decision to request the recount – and Gietzen’s decision to fund it – boggled political observers. For comparison, President Ronald Reagan’s blowout victory over Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984 featured a similar margin of victory in the national popular vote.

“You’re discrediting one of the central tenets of our democracy, which is fair and free elections, and I just think that’s a bad precedent to set, whatever your cause is,” state Sen. Tom Hawk, a Manhattan Democrat, said of the recount.

Leavitt has largely declined to speak with reporters, but has posted videos to TikTok throughout the recount process. Leavitt’s posts focus on vague claims of voter integrity concerns. She narrowed in on a technical error in a Cherokee County commission race as evidence of statewide issues.

Troy Hood, a political science professor at the University of Georgia who studies elections, said errors like this are usually isolated and not evidence of a broader problem.

“That is exactly the kind of thing that balloons into larger fears from certain people in the public. They think that they have something concrete they can point to,” Hood said.

The delays in Sedgwick County and error in Cherokee County are likely to fuel conspiracy theorists for the foreseeable future.

Gietzen, who funded the recount, told The Star after the recount was completed that he would not pay for the Sedgwick County recount because of the delay. Gietzen said he would file a lawsuit Monday calling for a full statewide hand recount.

“It was absolutely foolhardy for the secretary to not call an immediate stop and a recount, hand recount on everything,” Gietzen said, arguing the state must prove Cherokee County’s error wasn’t widespread.

‘It’s attacking our election system’

For Gietzen’s part, he previously acknowledged the recount was unlikely to change the outcome but nevertheless situated it as the start of an effort to search for fraud. He suggested he and his allies would be going door to door to confront voters.

“The next step is to check the registrations of the people who they say voted,” Gietzen said. “I don’t care whether they voted yes or no, it doesn’t make any difference to me. I want to know if a human being voted. So we’ll be visiting homes to see if anyone lives there – maybe 10 out of every precinct.”

State Rep. Stephanie Clayton, an Overland Park Democrat, said the recount effort struck her as an effort to punish counties that voted to protect abortion rights.

“It looks insidious. It’s a two-pronged attack. It’s attacking our election system and it’s attacking, specifically, the counties that didn’t vote the way that they wanted them to,” she said.

“They’re creating unnecessary work for our already overburdened election workers in what I see as an effort to put democracy itself at risk.”

Leavitt and Gietzen gained allies along the way from some within the anti-abortion community. Operation Rescue, a hard-line anti-abortion group, supported the recount and claimed, without evidence, that the only explanation for the landslide defeat is election fraud. Gietzen has been associated with Operation Rescue since the “Summer of Mercy” protests in 1991.

“Certainly, there were problems with the equivocal messaging and the lack of coalition-building on the part of the Value Them Both campaign, but now information has come out that leads us to believe that there may have been irregularities in the election process,” Operation Rescue President Troy Newman said in a newsletter.

Kansans for Life, the state’s largest anti-abortion group and main driver of the amendment push, and some Republican officials who supported the amendment distanced themselves from the recount effort over the past week, saying they remain laser-focused on the Nov. 8 general election when incumbent Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly will face Republican nominee Derek Schmidt, the Kansas attorney general.

“While Kansans have the right to request recounts, we knew it wasn’t going to change the results -- and that’s why since August 2nd, we’ve been working to move the cause of life forward in Kansas, not backwards,” Mackenzie Haddix, a spokeswoman for the Value Them Both Coalition and Kansans for Life, said in an email.

How Schwab, counties handled the recount

Schwab, the state’s top election official, has faced criticism over his handling of the recount, which also exposed gray areas in Kansas law. Leavitt, and others requesting recounts, were allowed to change their recount request days after the deadline and wait to post their bonds.

Kansas law required requests to be in by the end of the day Friday, Aug. 12, but Schwab’s office gave Leavitt until the end of the day Monday to provide the money. The law doesn’t explicitly require that bonds be provided at the same time a recount is requested.

Schwab, an Olathe Republican, told reporters this Friday that the law is unclear.

“We always interpret statute as pro-voter or pro-citizen, so we did the best we could,” Schwab said.

Over the past week, the recount saddled election workers with extra work just as they were attempting to finish work on the Aug. 2 primary. Instead of beginning preparations for the general election, officials in the nine counties instead had to quickly assemble a massive operation to recount each ballot by hand.

“I wouldn’t say frustrated. I’m exhausted,” Johnson County Election Commissioner Fred Sherman said Tuesday.

Sedgwick and Johnson counties amassed large staffs for the recount, with Sedgwick bringing in volunteers and Johnson pulling government workers from across the county. Johnson County didn’t finish sorting the ballots until Thursday afternoon, halfway through the allotted period for the recount.

A Johnson County spokeswoman said in an email Wednesday that the county expected to exceed the nearly $75,000 cost estimate it provided for the recount, which means the county could be on the hook for any additional cost.

Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said he and his staff were tired. Most of the election workers assisting his office had been around since July. The recount is also coming off the biggest primary election they’ve ever run, he said.

Still, Shew speaking with a reporter on Wednesday sounded an upbeat note about the process. Douglas County’s recount was aligning with the original results, he said, right down to the ballot.

“The cool thing, for me, is that we get to show we’re right,” Shew said.

The Wichita Eagle’s Chance Swaim contributed reporting.

This story was updated to reflect final vote numbers from the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office.