Johnson County election workers spent Memorial Day weekend sending out roughly 380,000 applications for mail ballots — one to every registered voter in the state’s most populous county.
Kansas has allowed voters to cast ballots by mail for any reason since 1996. But the unprecedented move by county officials reflects COVID-19’s impact on the mechanics and politics of voting in 2020. Their hope is to prevent long lines in August and November, as voters elect a new U.S. senator and other office holders amid the ongoing the pandemic….
But it’s actually the state’s smaller GOP-leaning counties where voters are requesting them at the highest rate. As of this week, 13 rural counties had processed mail ballot applications for 10 percent or more of their registered voters.
Trego County, a western Kansas county of less than 3,000 people, has had 24.2 percent of its registered voters request mail ballots.
Republic and Sheridan, two other small rural counties, were close behind with 22.9 percent and 19.1 percent respectively, according to Schwab’s office. All three counties are part of the heavily Republican 1st Congressional District, currently represented by Rep. Roger Marshall, a Republican running for U.S. Senate.
Marshall embodies the party’s conflicting sentiments on mail voting. During a virtual town hall on FOX 4 KC last week, he praised Kansas’ election system — which uses mail ballots widely — while also objecting to efforts to expand mail voting nationally.
Asked to clarify the congressman’s comments, Marshall’s spokesman Eric Pahls said in a statement that the congressman “supports local decision-making, and knows a national one-size-fits-all mail approach would be a disaster.”
Pahls added that Marshall “believes in the need for greater scrutiny into the entire mail-in process to ensure fraud and illegal harvesting are rooted out.”
Marshall’s top rival for the GOP nomination for Senate, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has also criticized efforts to expand mail voting nationally even though every election he oversaw during his two terms as the top election official featured the practice.