Give it up, Mark Gietzen. You can’t Donald Trump your way out of Kansas abortion vote

From the moment it was proposed, it was clear that the hand recount of the Kansas abortion amendment vote had no chance of changing the outcome. It was a waste of money and of county officials’ time, as we and many others said at the time. It’s no surprise, then, that now that it’s over, virtually nothing changed in the landslide win for abortion rights.

All along, the only possible upside had been that just maybe all the work of counting tens of thousands of votes by hand would discourage similarly divisive and destructive claims about the vote come November.

That’s probably wishful thinking, however, now that one of the two anti-abortion activists behind the unnecessary retabulation has already said he wants a recount of the recount.

How absurd. Mark Gietzen, a Wichita businessman who leads the Kansas Coalition for Life and a hard-right group known as the Kansas Republican Assembly, said he plans to sue the state to force them to count ballots all over again, thanks to a counting delay over the weekend in Sedgwick County, one of the nine in which votes were recounted.

Challenging the vote in an election that was decided by 59% to 41% of voters amid an unusually high turnout was questionable. Doing it a second time is, honestly, laughable.

After the recount was completed in the nine counties, fewer than 100 votes changed one way or another. That’s a tiny fraction — less than one-tenth of 1% — of 922,000 votes cast by Kansans in the August referendum.

Instead of showcasing trouble spots in our election system, the recount proved the opposite. “It shows the process does work.” said Rick Piepho, clerk and chief election officer of Harvey County, where the recount resulted in only five votes that had been improperly marked.

No system is perfect. And county election officials told us that hand counters found a few mistakes voting machines didn’t catch — such as when a voter indicated their vote with a check mark rather than completely darkening in the space next to their chosen answer.

The recount outcome is “proof that the machines are safe and accurate,” said Lisa Lusker, Crawford County election commissioner. “I would hope that this will give the voters another level of security in elections going forward.”

For most voters, yes. But for election deniers? Unlikely.

It’s no coincidence that voter fraud hysteria has grown to a roar in the years since Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s refusal to accept that defeat has stoked unfounded fears of election fraud throughout the United States. Partisans in Kansas have now seized on this narrative to question even an election as lopsided as the Aug. 2 vote.

That Gietzen now says he’ll sue if the state doesn’t count the ballots again — arguing that the extra day Sedgwick County took to certify its ballots amounted to a violation of the state’s open meetings laws — is proof positive that his beef isn’t with the Kansas system of voting.

His beef is with the way voters in his state answered the question. They want to keep abortion rights in the Kansas Constitution. He wishes they didn’t.

And apparently, he’ll keep asking officials in Kansas to keep counting the ballots, until the results tell a different story. That’s like punching the same numbers into a calculator again and again hoping for a different answer. That’s ridiculous.

It’s also what being a sore loser looks like.