By The Kansas City Star Editorial Board, The Kansas City Star
The ACLU of Kansas makes an excellent point in its new report on the critical role that local elections officials play.
These officials must do far more than merely count votes at election time. It’s also their duty to “foster a culture where democracy thrives,” the ACLU said in the report titled “All Democracy Is Local: The Impact of County Election Officials on Citizen Participation in Elections.”
The suggestion that election clerks need to be proactive players in spurring turnout is spot-on. As things stand today, Kansas taxpayers simply aren’t getting their money’s worth from county officials.
Statistics tell a big part of the story. The 59.2 percent turnout in the 2016 general election in Kansas ranked 34th nationally and was far from the 75 percent showing in the highest-turnout states. When it comes to the percentage of eligible voters actually registered, Kansas ranks 40th nationally.
How easy is it to vote in Kansas? Not very. Recent research cited by the ACLU ranked Kansas as the ninth-toughest state in which to cast a ballot.
“When it comes to the strength and soul of our democracy, something is not right in Kansas,” the report concluded.
The tortured reign of outgoing Secretary of State Kris Kobach, of course, didn’t help. This summer, a federal judge halted the state’s requirement that residents provide proof of citizenship before they could register to vote. Kobach had championed that law as part of his crusade against nonexistent voter fraud.
Bottom line: Local elections officials need to step up.
The ACLU surveyed all 105 county clerks in the state. Among the findings: 46 of the 87 clerks responding couldn’t name anything they were doing to engage low-turnout populations. Outreach to college students doesn’t appear to be happening.
Another finding: Not a single county in the state offers the full 20-day early voting period that the law allows. Only 28 counties permitted early voting on the Saturday before this year’s November election. And only 22 counties offered early voting outside of regular business hours.
The ACLU also found that turnout grew by 5 points in the three counties that provide for early voting, voting outside of normal business hours and multiple early voting locations.
“In far too many ways, the health of our democracy — and the extent to which an individual citizen’s vote counts — is based on the county in which one lives,” the ACLU concluded.
The organization called for the Legislature to expand the maximum number of in-person early voting days, establish a minimum number of early voting days and require counties to offer a minimum number of hours of weekend and after-hours early voting.
One goal should be to reduce the state’s high number of provisional votes cast when a voter’s eligibility is uncertain. In 2016, nearly 3 percent of the votes cast in Kansas were via provisional ballot. That’s three times the national average, and only three states had higher rates of provisional ballots cast.
When it comes to voting, something is indeed wrong in Kansas. County elections officials need to do far more.
“The more that citizens participate in a democracy, the stronger that democracy becomes,” the report says. Amen to that.