JC voters made their way to the polls Tuesday

Compiled from

Kansas Reflector stories

Jewell County voters and their counterparts from across the state made their way to the polling places on Tuesday to cast their primary ballots.

Though considered an off year election as it did not include a race for President and with few local races other factors generated considerable election interest in the Kansas election.

Regretfully, current mail dispatch times mean this isssue of your paper had to be printed before the polls closed and so we were unable to include the local election results. Those results should be available by now on our newspaper web page which can be found at jewellcountynewspaperscom.

Republican and Democratic primaries for Kansas governor were over months ago, but GOP voters Tuesday had to sort out their partisan nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer while Democrats choose among six candidates for U.S. Senate.

Locally Republicans had to choose their nominee for the southern county commissioner district. Ed Duskie and Mike Stauffer were seeking the Republican nomination.

Another Republican primary of note — it’s peculiar, not competitive — pit U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, who has served in Congress since 1997, against Derby resident Joan Farr, who also is an official GOP candidate for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma.

The August primary also settled the lineup for all 125 seats in the Kansas House and the special election in the Kansas Senate.

Conclusion of the primary season will light the fuse of the gubernatorial race between Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Attorney General Derek Schmidt, the certain Republican nominee. The Libertarian Party’s nominee is Seth Cordell of Lyons.

Hiawatha state Sen. Dennis Pyle turned in the required petition signatures to be placed on the November ballot as an independent candidate for governor, but the process of verifying or challenging those signatures hasn’t been completed.

The four campaigns for U.S. House should pick up steam and test Republican legislators’ strategy of gerrymandering the 3rd District enough to help Republican Amanda Adkins slip by U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation. The plan involved shifting half of Wyandotte County to the 2nd District represented by GOP U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner. It included jettisoning Lawrence from LaTurner’s district to the expansive, rural 1st District served by GOP U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann.

Former Gov. Jeff Colyer pleaded with two dozen volunteers and staff Monday to push through exhaustion and the heat to seek last-minute votes for an amendment to the Kansas Constitution declaring no right to abortion existed in the state.

Colyer, a pro-life Republican who lost the 2018 GOP primary for governor by less than 200 votes, said he wanted each person to make 10 phone calls to prospective voters, plant more yard signs across Topeka and hang more cards from home doors. He predicted the amendment vote would be close.

“This is the most important election in your lifetimes,” he told a group of elderly and youthful supporters. “Any of you can make a difference in this race.”

He said the undecided were on the cusp of choosing a side ahead of the Tuesday election determining outcome of a political battle fueled by millions of dollars, thousands of volunteeers, an unprecedented media barrage and an unusually high volume of misinformation about potential consequences of the statewide vote.

While Colyer was addressing supporters of the amendment, registered Democratic voters in Kansas were receiving unsolicited text messages that claimed a “yes” vote on the amendment would preserve reproductive rights in the state. The messages appeared to be from an “888” area code.

“Vote YES to protect women’s health,” the erroneous message to Kansas Democrats read.

On Monday, Secretary of State Scott Schwab said 270,000 people had voted in-person or by mail in the primary. That’s three times the number of advance ballots cast by Kansas voters in the 2018 primary election, the last without presidential candidates on the ballot. Kansas Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Independents — all were welcome to vote on the amendment — all piled into the controversy.

Schwab said 233,000 people had cast ballots in Kansas at this juncture in the 2020 primary, which featured the presidential vote. A mere 89,000 advance votes had been documented by now in 2018. He predicted turnout in Kansas could reach 36 percent or about 680,000 given importance placed on the abortion amendment and presence of competive partisan primaries.

Forces on both sides of the abortion debate continued to press potential voters to express their views on the Value Them Both amendment nullifying a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision that declared the right to bodily autonomy, including abortion, existed in the state constitution’s Bill of Rights. An international spotlight has been placed on Kansas because the amendment represents the nation’s first statewide vote on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June.