Paul Krugman: “partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results.”
J. Alex Halderman: “The Security Mindset”
Digital Transparency
“Digital transparency” should be a statewide initiative broader than elections and campaign finance. As a “data person” I’m looking for data that can be searched, sorted, filtered, charted, or used in computations. I claim we don’t really have full digital transparency when data provided online is not easily usable. Fixing data for analysis can often take minutes -- or hours – or possibly days.
Voter bloat: Review of how KSA 25-2316c(e)(5) did not yield “expected” results.
The table at the left shows disengaged registrants – registered, but never voted once. The table at the right shows disengaged voters – voters who have voted at least once, but for whatever reason quit voting. Boxes in red show numbers of inactive voters by registration year (left) and last voted year (right). My theory was the number of inactives should match the number of disengaged based on the “e5” law, but that wasn’t the case – by over 300,000.
Help America Voter Verification
Blue line shows weekly number of Help America Voter Verifications for Kansas there were from 2022-2024. The spike in 2022 was due to a large voter registration effort post Dobb’s decision and before the August primary. Red line shows percentage of non-matching transactions (to Social Security data) by week – why did early 2023 have such high non-match rates? The black line shows the percentage of matches that were to deceased in Social Security records. Why was that over 50% in one week in 2024?
There is overlap in campaign finance records maintained separately by the Secretary of State and the Public Disclosure Commission. These sources should be combined.
“Verified Statement” disclosures by election fundraising platforms?
In March a brilliant researcher in Utah published information about potential “smurf” donations by 13 contributors to nine Kansas legislative candidates. One alleged “smurf” denied any contributions or any tie in Kansas. Perhaps Kansas needs to require “Verified Statements” for fundraising conduits?
The nonprofit Kansas Values Institute in their 2022 IRS nonprofit tax filing admitted to spending over $23 million that year. Much of that spending was “pro-Kelly, anti-Schmidt” ads, which should not have been allowed by IRS rules.
Three health care foundations (Kansas Health Foundation, Health Forward Foundation, Reach Healthcare Foundation) spent $8.7 million from 2017-2024 for “Integrated Voter Engagement” to change the political climate of Kansas. This represents huge spending on Kansas elections without transparency.
Always good to see your comments, Cassie. Only the messenger was challenged and chided. None of the facts were challenged.
One State Rep found me guilty of presenting documented research at a legislative hearing without a degree in political science, and without citations to papers peer-reviewed by political scientists. Nevertheless, the public can still learn the truth.
I've always been a big proponent of "reproducible research" so I'd be happy to help anyone reproduce any of the numbers I presented.
Always good to see your comments, Cassie. Only the messenger was challenged and chided. None of the facts were challenged.
One State Rep found me guilty of presenting documented research at a legislative hearing without a degree in political science, and without citations to papers peer-reviewed by political scientists. Nevertheless, the public can still learn the truth.
I've always been a big proponent of "reproducible research" so I'd be happy to help anyone reproduce any of the numbers I presented.
Excellent work, as always, Earl. Really appreciate it.