Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s political action committee made some unsuccessful last-minute attempts to help Republican candidates in the Aug. 2 primary, but those expenses weren’t disclosed until this week.

Kobach’s PAC, Prairie Fire, has been a source of controversy since it was formed in 2012. His critics, both Republican and Democratic, have said they think it’s improper for the state’s chief election officer to be involved in trying to influence elections that he supervises. But Kobach has dismissed those criticisms, saying the secretary of state’s office is inherently political and that it also calls on him to supervise elections in which he himself is a candidate.

According to a campaign finance report filed this week, Prairie Fire made independent expenditures on behalf of four GOP candidates in the primary, including three candidates who lost that primary. But the report lists those expenses as having occurred on Oct. 5, two months after the primary.

Those expenditures included:

• $1,931.40 for mailers on behalf of Nicholas Allbritton of Junction City, who lost his GOP primary for the open 68th District House seat to Dave Baker.

• $3,078.69 for mailers on behalf of Joe Patton of Topeka, who tried unsuccessfully to unseat incumbent Sen. Vicki Schmidt in the 20th District Senate race.

• $1,692.23 for mailers on behalf of Steve Pearson of Emporia, who lost a primary to Mark Schreiber in the open 60th District House race.

• And $49.86 for “Miscellaneous Robocalls” on behalf of Rep. Bill Sutton of Gardner, who successfully fended off a primary challenge from Donald Roberts in the 43rd District House race.

Moriah Day, an aide in Kobach’s office, said the dates recorded on the report were incorrect and that the expenses were actually incurred in late July.

Candidates and political action committees were required to file pre-primary reports by July 25, reflecting activity that occurred between Jan. 1 and July 21. Day said he believed the expenditures were made after the July 25 filing deadline but was not immediately able to confirm that.

Douglas County registration numbers

Voter registration in Douglas County is up from where it was in the 2012 presidential race, but still lags behind the record level set in 2008, County Clerk Jamie Shew said Wednesday.

Shew said he certified the county’s voter registration rolls Wednesday morning showing 81,380 registered voters in the county. Democrats make up the largest share of that total, with 37 percent, followed by unaffiliated voters at 34 percent and Republicans at 27 percent. There are 932 registered Libertarian voters in the county, which is a little more than 1 percent.

Registration totals tend to peak during presidential election years, Shew said, but they taper off immediately afterward when inactive voters are purged from the rolls. If a voter does not cast a ballot in two consecutive general elections, local election officers attempt to contact that person to verify they still live at the same address. If they can’t confirm the person still lives at that address, the name is taken off the registration list.

This year’s total is slightly higher than the 78,725 registration total the county recorded just before the last presidential race in 2012. But it is still below the record 83,175 set just before the 2008 election, the last time there was an open presidential race.

Shew said he expects voter turnout this year to reflect that same trend. He said he expects it to be less than the roughly 55,000 votes cast in 2008, but more than the 50,000 or so cast in 2012.

He said that while advance voting this year has been breaking records, most of the advance ballots have come from people who vote every election cycle, not from new voters.

In addition, he said, advance voting among university students has been down.

“In 2008, we had huge advance turnout among university students,” he said. “We’re not seeing that now.”

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is scheduled to announce statewide registration numbers and expected voter turnout at a news conference Thursday.

More on votes on the 2011 voting laws bill

Tuesday’s story about local lawmakers who voted in favor of a 2011 bill imposing strict new voting requirements prompted a few more politicians to come out of the woodwork offering their memories of that legislative fight, and they illustrate how complicated the machinations of Statehouse politics can get.

One of the central issues, a couple of sources have said, was the threat that if the House and Senate didn’t pass the bill on the floor — which included a photo ID requirement and a delayed proof of citizenship requirement that wouldn’t take effect for another two years — there was another bill waiting in the wings that critics of the bill thought would be worse.

For one thing, Sen. Marci Francisco, D-Lawrence, said that bill would not have included the two-year delay on the proof of citizenship rule. Because of the delay, that rule didn’t come into play until the 2013 municipal elections in Kansas, and it didn’t come fully into play until the 2014 elections.

Also in that alternative bill was a provision that would have given the secretary of state power to prosecute election crimes.

Lawmakers eventually did pass a bill in 2015 giving the secretary of state prosecutorial power, and since then Kobach has obtained four convictions against people who cast ballots in Kansas and other states in the same election. None of the prosecutions has involved non-U.S. citizens voting in Kansas elections.