Rural Sedgwick County residents mistakenly given ballots for city elections, official says

Roughly 200 voters in rural areas outside Colwich and Garden Plain were able to vote in city elections after a mistake by the Sedgwick County Election office didn’t provide them with a separate ballot.

Election Commissioner Angela Caudillo said they learned about the mistake midday Friday when the Garden Plain city clerk emailed them that a voter said they lived outside of town but had city council races on their ballot.

Caudillo said they looked into Colwich after that because that city also had a precinct that covers the city and rural area. They found the same problem there — that there should have been two separate ballots for the people who live in the rural area versus the city, but there was only one.

The Garden Plain City Council contests and Colwich mayor are uncontested races, so they shouldn’t be affected. But the city council race in Colwich, where five candidates are vying for three positions, could be affected.

So far, they’ve found 89 people in rural Colwich and 140 in rural Garden Plain who voted in elections they should not have been able to. Those represent about 57% and 67% of the votes cast in those precincts that cover the rural area and city.

There is nothing election officials can do about the wrong votes from the rural areas.

“This is not ideal and it doesn’t feel good at all but we certainly want to let people know what’s going on and be transparent,” Caudillo said in a phone interview Saturday. “Elections are important.”

The elections office has made a second ballot for people in those rural areas who go to vote early or on election day Tuesday. The wrong ballots that could still be getting mailed in will be put aside, based on if the name on the envelope is a rural voter. It’ll be up to the canvass group to count those ballots, she said.

The election office can’t order another vote, but candidates could contest the election results, Caudillo said.

In small towns — Colwich has a population of around 1,500 and Garden Plain less than 1,000 — a small number of votes could change the outcome of an election.

The Sedgwick County Election Office had multiple problems in the Aug. 2 primary election that saw a record turnout for a primary election. The high turnout was driven by the failed Value Them Both abortion amendment.

The Sedgwick County Election Office had prepared for a turnout between 50-65%. It ended with a record high of 43%. But that number, combined with what Caudillo said was a high number of poll workers calling in sick because of COVID-19 exposure, led to people standing in lines for hours.

Several minor voting machine malfunctions that caused printer jams also added to the waits.

But the biggest mishap came roughly 20 minutes before polls closed at the Maize Recreation Commission precinct, where two poll workers told as many as 150 people standing in line to leave and vote at another precinct. Caudillo said that decision was made unilaterally without her approval, but she’s since talked with the workers and emphasized in training that anyone in line at 7 p.m. is allowed to cast a ballot.

More people are expected to vote during the general election, where turnout is between 52-55% of registered voters, Sedgwick County spokesperson Nicole Gibbs said Friday.

There are around 330,000 registered voters in Sedgwick County. Just after 4 p.m. Friday, Gibbs said around 41,000 people had voted early in person and nearly 22,000 had submitted mail-in ballots, making turnout so far around 19%.

A heat map on the election’s office website shows polling places where the lines are expected to be the longest during election day on Tuesday.

Contributing: Matthew Kelly with The Eagle