photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Elections Office on West 23rd Street is pictured on July 13, 2022.

Douglas County has finished its recount of votes on the constitutional amendment on abortion, and the outcome hasn’t changed, the county’s election office said Friday.

The recount, which was initiated by anti-abortion activists in nine counties at the beginning of this week, was finished in Douglas County late Friday afternoon. As expected, the recount didn’t change the outcome of the vote in Douglas County, which still rejected the amendment with more than 81% of the vote.

The proposed amendment to the Kansas Constitution would have declared that women didn’t have a constitutional right to abortion in Kansas. Statewide, it was rejected 59% to 41%.

Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew told the Journal-World that even though the county has processes in place for a situation like this, it’s the first time the county has performed a full recount.

More than 47,000 ballots were recounted, and the only changes were the addition of two “yes” votes and the subtraction of 15 “no” votes. Shew said the few changes that occurred were because some markings on ballots can be interpreted differently when they’re being counted by hand.

“Kind of a cool part, if there’s a cool part to it, is we’re able to say we were right,” Shew said. “… Our community spoke in a very large voice in this election, and the ability for our office to say, ‘We counted your votes correctly,’ it’s pretty cool to be able to do that.”

Shew said the process took about 30 hours of work from Tuesday through Friday, with 20 volunteers helping to count the ballots by hand each day.

The elections office also kept a live spreadsheet that tracked the recount results by precinct throughout the process. Shew said the resource was intended to make the process more transparent as it happened. It was a tool that the office hasn’t employed before, but Shew said he thought it was a successful experiment.

Because the result of the vote didn’t change, the county will be reimbursed for the cost of the recount. However, Shew said Friday that he wasn’t yet sure what the exact cost was. He said his office would be working next week to make that determination and submit the numbers to the Kansas Secretary of State’s Office.

“That part I haven’t really thought about,” Shew said. “It was just to get to this point, so next week we’ll work on the finances part.”

The recount follows a busy couple of months for the elections office. Shew noted that the primary election itself had a record-breaking turnout of voters, and it followed directly on the heels of county redistricting.