TOPEKA — As county officials across Kansas continue to submit final vote counts, the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office’s post mortem of the 2024 election indicated a smooth transition of power.
Preliminary estimates show more than 1.3 million people, or about 64% of registered Kansas voters, submitted ballots this election, according to Whitney Tempel, a spokeswoman for the office.
That number is expected to increase in the following days, she said Wednesday, but it hasn’t yet lived up to Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s pre-election prediction that 2024 would be a record-breaking year for voter turnout. Voter turnout in the 2020 election totaled 1.38 million votes.
Tempel said no major problems impacted voting or the tallying of votes.
“We had a good night,” she said.
The office conducts a post-election audit every year, during which a dozen staff members pull slips of paper from a glass bowl to randomly select an audit for one federal race, one state-level race and one local race in each Kansas county. It’s a process that only takes the office’s staff about 35 minutes, but it serves the purpose of ensuring a fair, accurate election. County election offices, which will verify that hand-counted tallies match electronically tabulated votes, have until Nov. 18 to complete their audits.
The state office announced recounts Wednesday afternoon for two legislative races separated by fewer than 1% of votes cast.
In a Senate district encompassing parts of Leavenworth and Wyandotte counties, incumbent Sen. Jeff Pittman, a Democrat, and Republican Jeff Klemp were separated by 57 votes, based on unofficial results. Klemp held the slim lead. Another Democratic incumbent, Rep. Nikki McDonald, held a lead by 95 votes over Republican challenger Kurtis Ruf in the race for a Johnson County House seat.
The Secretary of State’s Office hadn’t received any requests for wholesale recounts as of Wednesday afternoon. After the August 2022 primary election, the office recounted by hand ballots cast in nine counties, per the request of anti-abortion activists who made vague claims about election integrity. The recount request followed results showing Kansans overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment to end abortions in Kansas, and it resulted in the margin of votes narrowing by 64 after 556,364 ballots were recounted.
“Not one outcome was overturned,” Schwab told reporters during a virtual briefing Tuesday.
This election cycle, Schwab got out ahead of false claims about election inaccuracy or interference, which were largely promoted by President-elect Donald Trump.
“If we haven’t proven it by now, there’s nothing more we can do,” he said. “I will say after that 2022 recount, our phones quit ringing. I mean, the proof was in the pudding.”
Preliminary results indicated sizable victories for Kansas Republicans. They showed Republicans preserving their supermajorities in both the Kansas House and Senate and enough conservative wins on the Kansas State Board of Education to shift power in their favor. An estimated 57% of Kansas voters cast their ballots in favor of Trump.
