Kansas voter history from Nov. '22 election still not available
Kansas Secretary of State's elections office says 18 counties have not completed update
Updated Feb. 13, 2022.
Analysis of voter history from the Nov. 2022 general election might provide insights about what happened last year, but statewide data are not yet available.
County election officials record voter history after an election and that information is available in voter registration data that can be purchased from the Kansas Secretary of State.
Most county election officials are county clerks, who are separately elected, and often wear a number of other “hats” besides elections.
The CVR form gives this disclaimer:
The accuracy and timeliness of the records vary according to county. No guarantee as to the accuracy and timeliness of the data is made by the Office of the Secretary of State.
I made my first inquiry about the Nov. ‘22 voter history to the Secretary of State’s election office on Dec. 30. I indicated I wanted to buy only a complete list with recent voter Nov. ‘22 history. The $200 cost of the statewide data is too much for incomplete data.
Kansas Secretary of State Election Project Manager Phill Hall on Jan. 12 replied: “We currently have 87 counties who have completed their vote history for the 2022 General Election.” In a phone call last week Mr. Hall confirmed the number “87” had not changed.
On Wed. Feb. 1 I sent an email request to all 105 county election officials asking if they had completed their update. Thirty-six counties replied within two days.
On Friday Feb. 3 I sent a follow-up to 69 counties that had not replied asking for a simple “yes” or “no” response. Eleven additional counties replied “yes" they had completed the update.
From Feb. 6 through Feb 13 I contacted 37 county clerks by phone who confirmed they had completed the update. Sedgwick County clarified an earlier response: they had completed the task last year.
At present the update status of 20 counties is unknown after two emails, and one or more attempts to contact by phone.
In two of the calls the new clerks had only been on the job for one or two days. One clerk suggested another dozen or so county clerks could be retiring in the next few weeks.
Only Atchison County acknowledged they were working on the update. The clerk promised the update would be available “soon.”
36 + 11 + 37 + 20 + 1 = 105. All counties have been contacted. Let’s see how complete the voter history is now in the data from the Secretary of State.
Future solutions?
There needs to be a better way to get this information from the counties.
What might be a good solution to prevent this problem in the future? Could the Secretary of State provide weekly online updates on the voter history progress of all 105 counties? “Peer pressure” among the counties might encourage prompt updates.
Could the Secretary of State provide a free weekly version of the data (perhaps without names and street addresses) that would be useful only for research purposes? Or perhaps Kansas could follow Ohio’s lead and put all voter data online for free with weekly updates?
An online dashboard of county “inactive” voter rates might provide “peer pressure” for more timely maintenance updates of voter rolls by the counties. Inactive voter rates that are too high or too low are indications of problems.
Insightful as always. I still sense some shenanigans... but JoCo has, admittedly, been invaded by leftists. Though only after conservatives made it an amazing place to raise a family. The lefts imported politics WILL be the death of it.