Getting voter suppression rolling early in and around Wichita....
The Sedgwick County commissioners who have been given more voting control by even more Republicans in the State Legislature have decided that spending $100k to mail out advance voting ballots is a big ole' waste of money. Never mind that when first implemented it DOUBLED the amount of advance mail in voters plus the benefit of reducing long lines for those voting by machine. The savings?? About 20 cents per Sedgwick County resident.
"In 2006, the last year before the election office started sending early voting flyers, advance and mail ballots accounted for 26 percent of voters, records show. The first year the flyers were mailed, 2008, that jumped to 56 percent. Advance voting stayed between 50 and 60 percent until last year’s special election for Congress, when Mike Pompeo resigned his House seat to join the Trump administration. Because of the short time frame, the election office couldn’t send a flyer and advance voting dropped back to 27 percent, Lehman said. As a result, lines at some locations ran 45 minutes to an hour and some voters had to give up because they just couldn’t wait that long, she said."
"One thing that rankled commissioners was Lehman’s (election commissioner Tabitha Lehman) testimony to the Legislature about the flyers in February. In the 2016 Presidential election, around 50,000 people requested ballots by mail utilizing this mailer,” she testified. If even a quarter of those individuals show up to vote on Election Day, we will be utterly crippled in the 2018 General Election. I sincerely believe that the actions taken by the Board of County Commissioners will lead to the disenfranchisement of registered Sedgwick County voters who are unable to wait in line to vote on Election Day.”
That special election was barely won by Republican sock puppet Ron Estes over Dem James Thompson for a seat that Pompeo won by about 30 points previously. These ass hats are SCARED to death of Thompson who announced he would run again literately the next day and has been fund raising since.
http://www.votejamesthompson.com/
http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/election/article203028564.html