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Commissioner urges statute change after county's machine-readable election reports redact small precincts
Summary
A county commissioner demonstrated that machine-readable election reports redact small precincts (threshold: 20 or fewer voters), leaving thousands of votes out of publicly viewable precinct results and proposed merging adjacent precincts for reporting; staff drafted language to amend statute for precinct combination.
A Sedgwick County commissioner told the staff meeting that the county's machine-readable election reports are redacting many small precincts, producing significant gaps in reported vote totals and limiting public analysis. The commissioner showed precinct-level outputs and said redaction rules for precincts with 20 or fewer voters resulted in about 4,485 votes not shown in the portions of the exports he examined.
"If you add up the votes in those three columns and look at how many ballots are actually cast, there's 4,485 votes that are not shown here, and they are redacted," the commissioner said, adding that some precincts contain only a single registered voter and therefore reveal an individual's ballot choice when displayed and so are redacted to protect privacy.
Staff and commissioners discussed a proposed statutory fix to allow precincts separated only by a public right-of-way (for instance, a county road) to be combined for reporting purposes when the ballots are identical across the adjacent precincts. The platform draft posted later in the meeting included a proposed item to modify state statute so that “any election precinct separated from other precincts by any public right of way ... may be combined with an adjacent precinct as long as the political districts are the same for each of the combined districts.”
Commissioners framed the issue as both a transparency and a privacy question: small-precinct redaction protects voter privacy in tiny precincts, but the current approach can produce large numbers of unshown votes that reduce public confidence and hinder local analysis. Staff agreed to incorporate a statutory change request into the county's 2025 legislative platform for consideration by the legislature and the Kansas Association of Counties.
Provenance: topicintro SEG 024; topfinish SEG 2019
