Sedgwick County misses deadline for finalizing Kansas abortion recount results

Sedgwick County will miss the Saturday deadline for reporting final results on the abortion amendment recount after the election commissioner asked for more time to review an apparent anomaly in the data.

The county abruptly postponed a scheduled recount canvass with no explanation late Friday. On Saturday morning, Sedgwick County Commissioner Jim Howell shared a text from County Manager Tom Stolz with The Eagle.

“Proofreading our results, I found some things that I just wasn’t 100 percent comfortable with and I wanted to make sure and get it right,” Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Anglea Caudillo is quoted as saying in the text from Stolz.

“She has already notified the secretary of state that she will miss the deadline. She did not divulge what the problem was,” Stolz told commissioners at 10:40 p.m. Friday.

Howell said Saturday morning that he has no additional information about what specifically Caudillo wants more time to investigate.

“I’m guessing that they probably found some anomaly somewhere and they have to go back and double check now,” Howell said. “Which is why they do all that sorting ahead of time, so if these are all the precincts that matched correctly, this one’s got a big error or whatever. They’ve got to go back and investigate.

“I think they thought for sure it was going to line up. Something’s not lining up, and now they’ve got to go figure out why.”

In an email response to The Eagle, a county spokesperson said the review “needed more time” and that the public will be updated on new information as it becomes available.

On Friday afternoon, the county had said it finished its recount of votes on the amendment. It had been scheduled to announce the results at a canvass at 8 a.m. Saturday.

It sent out this announcement shortly before midnight Friday: “The Sedgwick County Recount Canvass originally scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 20, 2022, has been postponed. Additional time is needed and more information will be forthcoming on rescheduling.”

Caudillo said earlier that she had no reason to believe the landslide victory for abortion rights would change in the state’s second-largest county after the recount.

“We didn’t see anything that we would expect to make a swing in that direction at all,” Caudillo said.

The recount was to have been completed and certified by 5 p.m. Saturday.

The Kansas recount was requested a week ago by Melissa Leavitt, a Colby resident who has testified to the Kansas Legislature about 2020 election conspiracy theories. Mark Gietzen, a Wichita anti-abortion activist and former chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party, helped pay for the recount. They initially sought a statewide recount but raised enough money — $120,000 — to pay for a recount in nine out of 105 counties.

The proposed Value Them Both amendment failed 58% to 42% in Sedgwick County and 59% to 41% statewide. With 147,747 votes cast in Sedgwick County, 24,099 more people voted against the amendment than supported it, official results show.

In Sedgwick County, 150 election workers had been counting since 7 a.m. Wednesday to meet the Saturday deadline.

Ballots were recounted in four of the state’s most densely populated counties — Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee and Douglas, which all rejected the ballot by a wide margin — and four smaller counties where the amendment failed. Those counties were Crawford, Harvey, Jefferson and Lyon. They also ordered a recount in Thomas County, where voters favored the amendment.

Contributing: Katie Bernard of the Kansas City Star