Shawnee County: A Case Study on Early Voting Access

Your ability to vote and make your voice heard can vary severely based on where you live. Many decisions affecting voter access are made at the county level, meaning two neighbors on opposite sides of a county line could have dramatically different options on how to vote.

One example of this is Shawnee County.

Shawnee is Kansas's third most populated county, yet only offers one early voting location for voters. For reference, no other top-5 populated city offers fewer than 4; Johnson and Sedgwick offer 18 and 19 locations respectively. By only offering one early polling location, county officials are making it dramatically harder to early vote in Shawnee County.

You can see how much harder it is to vote in Shawnee when you compare it with Wyandotte, which is roughly the same population. Wyandotte offers 5 locations for early, in-person voting; this means it has one poll for every 18,321 people. By contrast, Shawnee has one early in-person voting location, which has to serve all 116,186 registered voters.

The harm from this decision becomes more striking when you look at less populated counties that offer more early voting locations.

Butler County has fewer than half the number of registered voters as Shawnee County, yet offered 2 polling locations in 2022; this means they have a polling location per 23,924 registered voters, making it nearly 5x more accessible by this metric than Shawnee. More dramatically Brown County has only 6,546, yet offers 4 voting locations, making it 71x more accessible than Shawnee County based on early voting locations per registered voter. (Brown County is also roughly the same area as Shawnee, meaning the average distance to the poll is much lower as well).

Finally, Shawnee falls short in the time they offer for early voting. They offer 11 days of early voting, fewer than many smaller counties and about half of the 20 allowed by law. More dramatic is the number of early in-person voting hours offered outside of business hours. Shawnee only offers 20 hours, whereas across the county line in Douglas voters have nearly double that at 36 hours. Wyandotte takes this further with 48; Johnson County laps Shawnee with 180 non-business early vote hours. Even the much smaller Crawford County offers 54 hours of early voting outside of business hours.

This is much more than mere data. Every extra polling location means an easier process for real voters to vote early. Every extra day of early voting means more opportunities to vote, which can also lead to a faster process, especially by reducing lines on Election Day. And every hour offered outside of 8-5 work day could be the difference between someone who works casting a vote or not.

Our democracy is strongest when every eligible voter makes their voice heard. In Kansas, county election officials make decisions that have the biggest impact on voter access. Though this has the downside of access varying across counties, the upside is that the decision-makers are local, and every Kansan can work within their own community to make it easier to vote for themselves and their neighbors.