Why do some voters distrust elections? How do we heal the divisions underlying the distrust? How can election officials educate voters to help increase trust in elections? Is there a real threat to Kansas elections?
These and other questions emerged in a live streamed event The Journal presented Oct. 26 as part of its “Trusting the Vote” digital series. The eight-part series and livestream are intended to foster a deeper understanding of elections and voting to stimulate thinking about how Kansans and the nation can exercise leadership while facing another difficult civic moment on Nov. 8.
Executive Editor Chris Green moderated a panel including:
- Barbara Shelly, Journal contributor
- Joel Mathis, Journal contributor
- Karen Dillon, Journal contributor
- Mark McCormick, Journal contributor
- Tabitha Lehman, former Sedgwick County election commissioner
To open the event, Green posed the question: “Do Kansans still trust in their elections?”
The question was “at least partially answered,” he said, by a Kansas Speaks opinion poll published Oct. 25 by the Docking Institute of Public Affairs at Fort Hays State University. The Wichita Journalism Collaborative, of which The Journal is a partner, co-sponsored the poll with funding from the Wichita Community Foundation.
In a survey of 520 Kansans:
- Nearly 70% of adult residents said winners of Kansas elections actually received the most votes.
- About half think fraud is generally not a problem, and 16% think fraud is a problem.
- About 12% think state and local election officials commit election fraud to alter election outcomes, while 48% disagree.
The poll also showed Kansans broadly support advance voting and voting by mail, Green said. They’re less supportive of voting drop boxes: Nearly 31% support banning them and 45% oppose banning them. They also broadly disagree that government makes it too difficult to vote in Kansas.
One interpretation is that the poll might suggest Kansans are less polarized about election security than in other parts of the country, Green said.
“But how solid is the foundation for that trust?” he said. “We seem to be headed in a direction where that trust is going to continue to get tested. The upheavals that spring from the 2020 presidential election have Kansans and other Americans talking about our elections this year in ways that feel very different from how it has been in past election cycles. From concerns about voter fraud and democracy to the recount of the August vote on the abortion constitutional amendment, the system seems under a microscope as the 2022 midterms take place on Nov. 8.”
Green said that, while the recount was underway on the abortion amendment, which failed, many at The Journal started wondering:
- How much do Kansans really know about their elections and how they work?
- What’s the source of this distrust?
- What is really dividing us on this issue?
Contributors to The Journal spent the past eight weeks exploring the election system—how it came to be and how it works—toward the end of broadening its audience’s civic knowledge. “Trusting the Vote” focuses on the perspectives of election officials, poll workers, poll agents, new voters and those who doubt the state’s election integrity.
Green asked the panelists what questions they wanted to explore among themselves. McCormick, who is deputy director of strategic initiatives at the ACLU of Kansas, said he wanted to hear from his colleagues about “how we heal some of the divisions that are driving a lot of the issues that we’ll be talking about today.”
Lehman is a nationally certified election administrator with over 20 years of experience in elections. She was Sedgwick County’s election commissioner for nearly 10 years and is now an election consultant who helps other election officials around the country.
Lehman’s question: “How can election officials educate voters in a way to help increase trust in elections? That’s always been a problem and there’s no perfect answer, but it’s something that we need to keep asking.”
Dillon has been a journalist for 40 years, first in Sarasota, Fla., and then at The Kansas City Star for many years, the Lawrence Journal-World and now as a freelancer. For roughly the past four years, she has worked for the Johnson County Election Office as an election worker and now trains election workers and is a supervising judge on election days.
“My story is about the doubters, the people questioning our elections,” Dillon said. “I was really interested in why they don’t trust our election system. What does it take to make them trust the system again? A leader riding in on a white horse, white hat?”
Shelly, who also worked at The Star for many years, asked: “Do we really think there’s a threat to Kansas elections as far as voter confidence? Do we really think there could be a real challenge to an election result, or are these threats we’ve been hearing coming from the margins?”
Green asked whether threats from the margins were still threats.
Mathis also worked at the Lawrence Journal-World and other publications. He writes weekly opinion columns in The Star and the Wichita Eagle. He asked: Are the Kansas Speaks survey respondents who gave neutral responses “open to the possibilities either way? How does that affect our elections?”
Mathis’ “Trusting the Vote” story is about “whether we need to worry about a stop the steal movement happening in Kansas this fall.”
“One thing that surprised me was there was concern about –and this relates back to (Johnson County) Sheriff Calvin Hayden – you might see him or other sheriffs in other jurisdictions try to intervene somehow.”
Green asked Mathis whether his reporting left him more or less confident that “stop the steal isn’t in the cards for Kansas.”
“There are deep concerns, but also people don’t want to be shrill, the sky is falling,” Mathis said.
Patrick Miller, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, told Mathis that even in worst-case scenarios, “the right people who were elected are still going to end up in office.” A professor from St. Louis told him that “maybe the point isn’t necessarily to win this election or to steal the offices back but to undermine the integrity of and confidence in the system over the long term. … And that’s the thing that left me discomfited,” Mathis said.
Lehman said election integrity always has been a long-term question across the country.
“Elections are always going to be a subject that has to be verified,” she said. “This is not a subject where we should just trust and walk away. That’s why you see post-election audits, testing of voting equipment before and after elections … and why so much of it is so transparent.”
Lehman said she was sued multiple times about rigged voting machines and “vilified in the press frequently because they felt I wasn’t being transparent, even though each one of those lawsuits proved I was following the law. … Ultimately, those lawsuits actually led to us having post-election audits in Kansas.”
She said that before 2016, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump started saying the only way he’d lose the election would be if it were rigged, his supporters took the bait. But after 2016, she didn’t “get a lot of flak from Trump campaign people; what I got was from Hillary’s campaign and supporters convinced she didn’t lose.”
“This isn’t unique over the years,” she said. “It seemed like every election, there’s always been at least one candidate convinced they didn’t actually lose and that it was because something nefarious went on. What is new is it’s becoming a national talking point and accepted rhetoric that’s used within a political party. … While this isn’t new in Kansas, it’s certainly a lot worse, and I think that we’re going to continue to see it get worse.”
Lehman said she feared burnout for experienced election officials who would then leave the field. They’re “already overworked, underfunded and understaffed. Now they’re overrun by open records requests. … I’m concerned it will have long-lasting impact on election administration where we’re going to end up with so many people who don’t know what they’re doing, and it’s going to have detrimental impact on voters.”
Green said concerns expressed from both the political left and right “suggest something systemic” and asked where the distrust originated.
“A couple of candidates didn’t want to accept that people didn’t want them in office,” Lehman said. “Or something minor would happen and they said, ‘That’s why I lost.’ Now it’s more nefarious – people trusting the wrong individuals for their data. You can stare at a pink elephant and say it’s orange all you want, but it doesn’t change the elephant into being orange; it’s still pink.”
Lehman said Kansas “absolutely” should trust the election process and accuracy of their votes. She voted by mail and put her ballot in a drop box in the August primary after 20 years of election experience in Kansas. She trusts the process. Human error occurs, but systemic protections are in place “to correct those mistakes before the vote’s certified.”
Dillon said she talked to several people, and for most of them Trump’s loss solidified their doubts. Trump said he was winning though he was losing. He said a fraud was being perpetrated on the American public. This left a “profound, deep feeling that something was wrong with the election system.”
Some of the people Dillon talked with were involved in lawsuits against election offices, “and all of them believe there’s something wrong with not just Kansas but with the country.”
“One woman believes that God set her on this path, and she tried to rectify the problem and she’s teaching other women, older women, how to do Freedom of Information requests and sunshine requests trying to get all this data pulled together,” Dillon said.
Another woman Dillon spoke with who has been helping file lawsuits alleging fraud “says her evidence is hard, it’s real, and that her lawsuits have been dismissed not because of her evidence and her facts but because she lacks standing, that she isn’t representing all the population but just herself or just a few. I think I’m just about as mystified as I was going into it. … They say they’re not going to be happy until we all vote on paper. They want to do away with all the machines, mail-in ballots – all that should be gone.”
McCormick asked Dillon how the people she interviewed would reconcile that some Republican candidates won elections even though Trump didn’t.
“They don’t tend to reconcile anything,” Dillon said.
She spoke with “a very sweet couple” who trust Kansas elections but watched the documentary “2,000 Mules” and “truly believe that in other states that were addressed in this film that there’s a serious, horrible problem … in their election system. But they don’t believe that it is a problem here in Kansas because Secretary of State Scott Schwab told them personally there wasn’t a problem. … They truly trust him. They believe him.”
Shelly discussed the “long arc of accessibility for voters” in Kansas starting in the 1860s, soon after the Civil War with absentee balloting for soldiers and then for railroad workers. Before the 19th Amendment, women were voting in Kansas. For a time, non-citizens could vote in Kansas “if they said they planned to become citizens.”
Shelly lives in Missouri, two blocks from the state line.
“All my friends in Kansas are out weeks before the election” doing advance or mail-in voting, she said. “Only this year we did get two weeks of no-excuse absentee voting in Missouri. I’ll probably trudge down to the local election place on Election Day. … I think support for that kind of openness is still very strong in Kansas. You haven’t seen too many Republicans who … want to roll back the clock on advance voting. Drop boxes, yes, but not advance voting.”
That long arc of accessibility was thrown off its curve around 2010, though, largely because of Kris Kobach “running for offices on the platform that there was something wrong with elections in Kansas,” Shelly said.
“His thing to start with was that we had a flood of non-citizens voting, and somehow that kind of got under the skin of the whole Kansas election system to the point where now the groups that rate elections as far as openness don’t give Kansas a high grade,” Shelly said. “Now, there are groups out there that like to rate states in terms of election security, and they are giving Kansas ever-improving grades because of some of the legislation that’s come out over the last few years.”
Voter identification requirements, which came to Kansas in 2011, now have bipartisan support in many polls, but citizenship verification didn’t pass judicial scrutiny, Green said. Shelly called citizenship verification a “draconian move” that “created havoc.” Motor vehicle offices were telling people they could register to vote there without proof of citizenship, but local election offices were disqualifying them because the offices had no proof of citizenship. “That didn’t hold up in the courts,” Shelly said.
Lehman said she “actually lived those laws” and “was there for implementation of proof of citizenship” and was called to testify in court and cross-examined by the ACLU.
“Significantly, because of the non-citizens who had registered to vote in Sedgwick County … over 80 percent of them … registered to vote in person at a DMV and a government agent registered them,” Lehman said. “So, in my opinion, we should’ve been going after those government agents, because if I was in a foreign country and I walked up to a government official … and they said, “Hey, do you want to register to vote?’ my first thought wouldn’t be, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’”
Kobach appointed Lehman three times, and though they “don’t agree on many things, I don’t think I ever heard a word out of his mouth in this arena where his desire was to keep people from voting. He genuinely was trying to secure our elections. … I will defend him on that subject because I do not believe that’s his heart.”
Journal columnist Amanda Vega-Mavec had sat with Green for a video interview about her experience talking with 15 women, mostly Latinas, who weren’t regular voters. Green showed the video during the live streamed event. A graphic in it said a higher percentage of Latinas had voted in the 2020 presidential election than in any other presidential election in the prior 40 years.
Vega-Mavec said her family had “taught us the importance of voting.” But “very few” in the group of women she talked with “had a voting plan.” She was surprised that not everyone’s voting experience had been like hers; not everyone “knew what to do.”
“They think, ‘My vote doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter. What’s one vote?’” she said.
She started educating voters with “clear, simple, direct, nonpartisan information so I can make an informed decision,” she said. Many of them wanted the information in Spanish.
“It’s not about telling people who to vote for, but it’s about getting people engaged,” Vega-Mavec said.
McCormick cited reporting that 291 Republican “election deniers” were on ballots across the country and that 171 of them were favored to win.
“This is really our challenge,” he said. “Can we really have people who don’t believe in democracy and our elections actually running elections or serving in public office? Those are some of the questions we’re going to have to address as a populace.”
Shelly said she thought that “it’s going to have to come from elected leaders” and that Kansas was “fortunate to have a secretary of state who will not back down and say there’s something wrong with Kansas election systems despite pressure in his party. And I think it’s going to take elected officials of both parties to stand up and do the same thing.”
Lehman said Schwab “shouldn’t be the only Republican saying elections are secure.” Lehman had been a registered Republican since age 18, but she became unaffiliated a couple of weeks ago, “because I will no longer be part of a party who will not stand up against bullies and manipulators and speak the truth.”
“They’re not speaking the truth nationally, they’re not speaking it at the state level, and they’re not speaking it here in Sedgwick County,” she said, “and I will not have my name associated with this party anymore. … We have to stand up for the truth. … The moment that this rhetoric started, the Republican Party should have been saying, ‘Wait. You have to have viable, actual proof before we’re going to jump on this bandwagon.’ But they’re pandering to people instead of standing up for what’s right and what’s true.”
McCormick said that “we have to have people who decide on the side of democracy and our country, as opposed to these tribes that we’re in and fighting these proxy wars based on what tribe we’re in.”
Watch the discussion’s full video at the Kansas Leadership Center’s YouTube channel.
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