Kansas City Star. August 20, 2022.
Editorial: Give it up, Mark Gietzen. You can’t Donald Trump your way out of Kansas abortion vote
From the moment it was proposed, it was clear that the hand recount of the Kansas abortion amendment vote had no chance of changing the outcome. It was a waste of money and of county officials’ time, as we and many others said at the time. It’s no surprise, then, that now that it’s over, virtually nothing changed in the landslide win for abortion rights.
All along, the only possible upside had been that just maybe all the work of counting tens of thousands of votes by hand would discourage similarly divisive and destructive claims about the vote come November.
That’s probably wishful thinking, however, now that one of the two anti-abortion activists behind the unnecessary re-tabulation has already said he wants a recount of the recount.
How absurd. Mark Gietzen, a Wichita businessman who leads the Kansas Coalition for Life and a hard-right group known as the Kansas Republican Assembly, said he plans to sue the state to force them to count ballots all over again, thanks to a counting delay over the weekend in Sedgwick County, one of the nine in which votes were recounted.
Challenging the vote in an election that was decided by 59% to 41% of voters amid an unusually high turnout was questionable. Doing it a second time is, honestly, laughable.
After the recount was completed in the nine counties, fewer than 100 votes changed one way or another. That’s a tiny fraction — less than one-tenth of 1% — of 922,000 votes cast by Kansans in the August referendum.
Instead of showcasing trouble spots in our election system, the recount proved the opposite. “It shows the process does work.” said Rick Piepho, clerk and chief election officer of Harvey County, where the recount resulted in only five votes that had been improperly marked.
No system is perfect. And county election officials told us that hand counters found a few mistakes voting machines didn’t catch — such as when a voter indicated their vote with a check mark rather than completely darkening in the space next to their chosen answer.
The recount outcome is “proof that the machines are safe and accurate,” said Lisa Lusker, Crawford County election commissioner. “I would hope that this will give the voters another level of security in elections going forward.”
For most voters, yes. But for election deniers? Unlikely.
It’s no coincidence that voter fraud hysteria has grown to a roar in the years since Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s refusal to accept that defeat has stoked unfounded fears of election fraud throughout the United States. Partisans in Kansas have now seized on this narrative to question even an election as lopsided as the Aug. 2 vote.
That Gietzen now says he’ll sue if the state doesn’t count the ballots again — arguing that the extra day Sedgwick County took to certify its ballots amounted to a violation of the state’s open meetings laws — is proof positive that his beef isn’t with the Kansas system of voting.
His beef is with the way voters in his state answered the question. They want to keep abortion rights in the Kansas Constitution. He wishes they didn’t.
And apparently, he’ll keep asking officials in Kansas to keep counting the ballots, until the results tell a different story. That’s like punching the same numbers into a calculator again and again hoping for a different answer. That’s ridiculous.
It’s also what being a sore loser looks like.
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Topeka Capital Journal. August 19, 2022.
Editorial: Rise in child sex abuse cases reported by Kansas abortion providers shouldn’t have been a surprise
The shocking rise in child sex abuse cases reported by Kansas abortion providers needs to be addressed by our policymakers.
But legislators can’t tackle what they don’t know is a problem.
The Topeka Capital-Journal’s Jason Tidd reports the statistics were newly compiled by the Kansas Department for Children and Families, which is responsible for issuing a mandatory annual report of the abuses under state law. However, it hadn’t done so for the past six years until asked about it by Tidd.
“The Brownback administration stopped publishing these reports in 2016,” said DCF spokesperson Mike Deines. “It is unclear why. Once we were made aware of this, we updated the requested data from the missing years to ensure that the public record is complete. Additionally, moving forward, we have put in place procedures to ensure that this information is published as required by KSA 65-445(g).”
This is concerning to us. We don’t know why the Brownback administration opted to stop doing the mandated reports — and frankly, at this point, it’s too late to worry about that. That being said it should have been spotted and addressed earlier in the Kelly administration.
While we can all see where and why many see Brownback as the state’s boogeyman, it’s a little late in Go. Kelly’s term for her department leaders to be passing the buck on this issue.
Tidd reports Kansas abortion providers have reported more than 100 cases of child sex abuse cases to state child welfare officials over the past six years. In the past fiscal year alone, abortion providers reported 56 victims of child sexual abuse to the Kansas Department for Children and Families.
One child was 8-years old. Another was 9, though the report doesn’t directly confirm that the patients were pregnant and got abortions. The agency’s six years of reports from abortion providers include several pre-teen victims: one 3-year-old, one 8-year-old, two 9-year-olds, two 11-year-olds and four 12-year-olds.
These stats are sobering.
Could the state have done something to prevent some of these unspeakable acts? We will never know, because we were never informed. Our policymakers can’t do anything about these situations if they’re not informed about the issue.
Rep. Susan Concannon, R-Beloit, made a wise observation: “Gosh, it makes me wonder what other reports we’re not getting,” she said. “The whole purpose when I pushed for the establishment of this oversight committee was to hear this type of thing.”
Let’s hope such information is readily available — and acted upon — in the months and years to come.
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