photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

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

Early voting for the Aug. 2 primary election is off to a busy start, and Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said it’s “extremely clear” that the reason is the proposed constitutional amendment on abortion that’s on the ballot.

Shew told the Journal-World Thursday afternoon that on Wednesday, the first day of early voting, 545 people voted in person at the Douglas County Election Office at 711 W. 23rd St. Another 200 people had voted in person as of around 1 p.m. Thursday. Those 745 in-person votes so far are more than half the total in-person primary votes from each of the 2014 and 2016 election years, which had 1,180 and 991 total votes respectively.

It’s a similar story with mailed ballots, Shew said. The total mailed ballots from the 2014, 2016 and 2018 primary elections combined — 2,692 — are just a fraction of the 5,280 ballots mailed for this year’s primary so far.

“It is clear what is causing interest in this election,” Shew said. “When I ran those numbers, if you ever work with statistics and stuff, you don’t really ever see something that marked, that something has an impact like that.”

But it’s not just early voting; the number of new voter registrations has spiked too, and it seems that it’s a similar response to changes in the national landscape of abortion rights.

Shew noted that new voter registrations from the start of May to June 23 — the day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion nationwide — numbered 453. From the day of the Supreme Court decision to now, 588 new registrations have been processed, and Shew said there are still upward of 1,000 more new voter registrations that came in by the registration deadline earlier this week that need to be processed.

New advance voting applications have mirrored that spike during the same timeframe, Shew said. From the start of May to June 23, the office had received 100 new advance voting applications. Since June 24, more than 4,200 of those applications have been processed, and another 600 are still being entered.

These are the kind of voter registration numbers that usually occur before an even-year general election, Shew said, not prior to primaries. He said that and the early surge in voter turnout were probably because a constitutional amendment appearing on an August primary ballot is atypical; in fact, Shew said that to his knowledge there hasn’t ever been such a ballot measure on an August primary ballot in Kansas. Those ballot measures usually appear on the general election ballot, and Shew said the county is in “uncharted territory” for predicting election turnout as a result.

Many of this year’s voters have never voted in a primary election, Shew said, and that’s likely because Kansas has closed primaries. Typically, that means that only affiliated voters are casting ballots, and anyone unaffiliated with the Democratic or Republican parties doesn’t participate.

That has led to many of that unaffiliated group that typically wouldn’t be participating in the primary reaching out for more information, Shew said, enough so that the office has had to adjust staffing to meet the moment. There’s now a staffer working just to answer the phone calls the elections office has been inundated with, another thing Shew said is usually only typical during a general election.

“We kind of plan (election staffing) a year in advance,” Shew said. “Redistricting was really complicated for us, so we were dealing with redistricting and then this hit. We have been adjusting our staffing plan to be more like a general election … The past couple days has been bringing in more volunteers, more temporary workers.”

Anyone who’s registered to vote, including unaffiliated voters and Libertarians, can vote on the constitutional question, Shew said. Rather than at the Douglas County Courthouse, voters should vote in person at the elections office on West 23rd Street, which Shew said has now adjusted its hours to close at 6 p.m. each day to help serve more voters.

For more information about how to vote in Douglas County, including any future changes in hours of operation, visit the Douglas County Elections Office website.