BY KEITH LIPPOLDT

klippoldt@gbtribune.com

Based on the traffic in and out of her office at the courthouse Thursday morning, Barton County Clerk Bev Schmeidler and her staff are going to be extremely busy from now through election day, and beyond. Much more so than the August primary when only 20 percent of the registered voters cast a ballot.

With the 2024 election just 10 days away, in what could be one of the most important elections to date, the early voting numbers in Barton County are trending upwards. 

“There are 16,860 registered voters in Barton County. Only 20.26 percent of the registered voters voted in the primaries,” Schmeidler said. “But it’s usually that way on primaries. But people don’t understand that that’s where a lot of the decisions are made because that’s who gets to go on to the general election. But it’s going really well. We’ve had 1,150 early voters so far. Over 200 each of the last two days. And we still have several more days.”

Schmeidler said that, due to Kansas state law, early voting will end on Monday, Nov. 4 at noon.

But unlike the primaries, Schmeidler is expecting the surge to continue and she’s optimistic the voter totals could reach above half of the eligible voters.

“During years with a presidential election, the turnout is generally better,” she said. “I think 50 percent would be a good number. Maybe 50 to 55 percent. In the 2020 election, 68 percent voted. But that was the COVID year. We didn’t know what the world was going to look like, so we prepared mail ballot applications and mailed those to every registered voter for both the August and November elections. This year we’re at 700 to 800. So, I think if we hit 50-55 percent, which is still kind of sad … But it is what it is.”

Not too many years ago there were 23 polling places in the county, making for easier access to place your vote. For the past several years that number has been reduced to 10.

“There used to be 23 polling places, but it was consolidated down to 10 when we bought new equipment. The equipment’s expensive and we couldn’t find people to work at them. Because when you need four to five people at a polling place, it’s hard to find enough help,” Schmeidler said. 

For at least the past four years the news has been littered with voting fraud accusations from high profile candidates. Barton County, and all Kansas counties, have a system in place that would make that difficult to pull off.

“When the polls close at 7:00, each polling location has a series of things they have to do,” she said. “They shut down the polling machines. They have to take a thumb drive out, gather everything up and bring it into us. We have a check-in to make sure they brought everything, and then we can start uploading the results.

“The Secretary of State wants an early count,” Schmeidler said. “We can’t start counting until after the polls close at 7:00. We count our advance ballots – the mail ballots and the early ballots. We’ll get those tabulations and put out a report then, and we post that on our website. They would like a midway count but sometimes the results come in so fast we don’t have time to stop. I upload them as soon as they are brought in, and then we put a report out.”

Counting and authorizing the votes is a lengthy process. Schmeidler explained that the final tally isn’t official until the canvassing of provisional ballots has been completed the morning of Nov. 12 when the Board of County Canvassers, made up of the five county commissioners, completes its count. A provisional ballot includes, among others, those that have moved within the county and didn’t re-register, so they aren’t using the proper ballot; or they were married and their name changed but they didn’t re-register.

Another protective step is an audit of races, two days after the election is over.

“The Secretary of State will tell us what race or races we need to audit,” she said. “I think this year it will probably be two. They tell us what races and we do a random draw. We have somebody from another department come over and draw and that’s who we audit. An independent audit board comes in and they hand count to verify our results were right on the machine. And since 2019, we’ve had a clean audit every time.”

Even though it’s going to be a hectic few weeks, Schmeidler anticipates another smooth election process, and she doesn’t foresee any issues. 

When asked what would make for an ideal election day she responded, “Just that everything goes smoothly. It pretty much always does. You know, you might have little hiccups with machines, little things. I just hope that it goes smoothly, and we get a good turnout. Because it’s really sad that people don’t go vote.”