Kansas authorities conducted a recount of a decisive statewide vote that resulted in favor of abortion rights in the traditionally conservative state, with fewer than 100 votes changing after the last county reported its results on Sunday.
At the request of Melissa Leavitt, who has continuously pushed for tighter election laws, nine of the state's 105 counties recounted their votes. Furthermore, a longtime anti-abortion activist, Mark Gietzen, is covering most of the costs of the recount. Gietzen acknowledged in an interview that it was unlikely to change the results of the vote.
Kansas Abortion Rights Recount
A no vote in the referendum signaled a desire to keep existing abortion protections in the state and a yes vote was for allowing the Legislature to tighten restrictions or ban abortion. After the recount efforts, the "no" votes lost 87 while the "yes" vote gained six.
Eight of the counties reported their results by the state's Saturday deadline but Sedgwick County delayed releasing its final count until Sunday. This was due to spokeswoman Nicole Gibbs saying that some of the ballots were not separated into the correct precincts during the initial recount and had to be resorted on Saturday, as per the Associated Press.
Due to a larger than expected turnout of voters on Aug. 2, a ballot measure that would have removed protections for abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution and given the Legislature the right to further restrict or ban the procedure was rejected. The vote failed by 18 percentage points or 165,000 votes statewide.
The vote drew broad attention because it was the first state referendum on abortion since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier in June. Gietzen and Leavitt have both suggested that there might have been problems without pointing out many examples.
According to the Kansas City Star, the recount of the vote 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.
Rising Tensions
A law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Rick Hasen, who is also the director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said, "In this age of voter fraud hysteria, it appears that no amount of evidence is enough to convince some people."
Leavitt, who called for the recount, is known to have testified to the Kansas Legislature about 2020 election conspiracy theories. Baseless views about election fraud took hold of the United States, including among some in Kansas, after former President Donald Trump and his supporters falsely claimed the election was stolen.
Hasen noted that because Trump and many other Republican lawmakers clung to false claims of the 2020 election being fraudulent, voter confidence has declined nationally. On the other hand, Kansas for Constitutional Freedom, the main group that opposed the amendment, hailed the results of the recount.
The situation in Kansas comes as Louisiana state officials have delayed flood funding to New Orleans for a second time over city officials' stance on abortion. On Thursday, Louisiana's State Bond Commission denied funding for a $39 million infrastructure project in Orleans Parish for a second time.
State Attorney General Jeff Landry urged the commission to deny the funding in both instances due to a New Orleans City Council resolution encouraging area law enforcement not to enforce the state's abortion ban within their respective jurisdictions, CNN reported.
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