WICHITA, Kan (KSNW) – The Sedgwick County Election Office is conducting its election canvass on Thursday to present provisional ballots to the Board of Canvassers. The results will be officially announced on Monday afternoon.
The election office has been busy reviewing mail-in ballots, auditing, and categorizing provisional ballots, which total nearly 7,500 this year.
“The majority of those are people that showed up at the wrong polling place despite our efforts to tell them the 25 new polling places existed,” Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Laura Rainwater said. “A third of them are people not registered in Sedgwick County. We never turn a voter away from the polls, so we allow them to vote provisionally until we can validate their registration status.”
Rainwater says the parameters are decided by law.
“They’re defined by statutes of what they can and can’t accept,” Rainwater said. “There are state laws that govern whether they can accept a provisional ballot or not. It’s not just in my opinion.”
Sedgwick County completed its audit and went through over 200,000 ballots. They compared that to election night results, and the hand-counted results matched 100%.
Votes will not appear on Kansas Voter View until the end of next week after the canvass is complete.
Secretary of State Scott Schwab says election offices are very busy right now.
“Our election clerks do a wonderful job administering the election, getting their equipment deployed, returned safely so nothing is tainted,” Schwab said. “They do post-election audits, and there’s a stack of provisional ballots. I cannot give enough credit to clerks for how hard it is to go through all this administrative process, and then, oh, by the way, once we’re done, we got to send out tax notices. They really work hard.”
The state board of canvassers will meet on Dec. 2. Once that is signed, the election is official, and the only thing that can change it is the court.
Schwab says it is rare for provisional ballots to change election results because they usually break down similarly.
Once everything is certified, the Secretary of State’s Office will send out a survey to determine whether legislative changes are needed.
“How many provisional ballots were partially counted, how many didn’t get counted at all, what were the various reasons, how many ballots did you get between the end of the grace period and the canvass, and so when we base policy decisions they are based on numbers and data and not just subjective things we believe or don’t believe,” Schwab said. “We look at election security like we look at IT security. Maybe you’re secure today, but maybe something new pops up we need to adjust, or we don’t have a law that addresses this weird circumstance, so we get that through the survey.”
He says this year, more Kansans voted early than ever before.