Letter: Misleading figure

To the editor:

Gov. Brownback says that 70 percent of Kansas voters approved the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. That is not accurate, and someone needs to start challenging him on it — every single time he says it.

Here are the real numbers (all from the Secretary of State’s website), In the April 2005 vote on the constitutional amendment, 417,627 voted “yes” and 179,432 voted “no.”  That’s 70 percent to 30 percent, sure enough. But, as of October 2004, there were 1,694,365 registered voters in Kansas. So, out of all the registered voters in Kansas, just 35 percent turned out to vote on the amendment. Seventy percent of that 35 percent voted in favor of the amendment.

The 25 percent of registered Kansas voters who voted “yes” is NOT a majority. But, sadly enough, it’s enough to amend our constitution.