Kansas reaffirmed its landslide vote to uphold abortion rights after election officials on Sunday finished a recount that never had any chance of changing the outcome but was sought by an election denier and anti-abortion activist advancing baseless allegations of fraud.
The exercise instead delivered a second victory for opponents of an amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution.
But the recount of such a lopsided vote, rather than building credibility in the results, risks undermining trust in elections because the process provided fringe, diehard amendment supporters an opportunity to attempt to create an aura of uncertainty surrounding the vote when, in fact, none ever existed.
A hand recount in nine counties – including Johnson and Sedgwick, the state’s two largest – cost roughly $120,000 and burned countless hours as election officials scrambled to conclude the arduous process before a Saturday deadline. Kansas voters rejected the amendment, called Value Them Both by supporters, 59% to 41% with a margin of about 165,000 votes.
The partial recount ultimately changed the outcome by fewer than 60 votes — an infinitesimal fraction of the overall vote that included ballots from more than 922,000 Kansans.
Sedgwick County verified its results around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. The county missed the Saturday deadline, requesting an extension to review an apparent anomaly in the data — approximately 400 ballots had not been categorized by precinct. It was the last county to verify its recount.
“In this age of voter fraud hysteria it appears that no amount of evidence is enough to convince some people,” said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law.