CHAFFEE COUNTY, CO — A Kansas woman died in an accident Tuesday in Chaffee County Colorado.

Sheriff John Spezze reported a 2014 Jeep Wrangler driven by Jennifer Orr, 43, Wichita, was traveling on Iron Chest Road from CR 295 when it fell 600 feet down the mountain.

The jeep was at an elevation of over 11,000 feet at the time of the accident, according to Speezze.

Orr was pronounced dead at the scene.  A helicopter transported  Orr’s daughter who was passenger in the vehicle to a hospital in Pueblo.

LAWRENCE, Kan. (AP) — A Lawrence man who molested a girl beginning when she was 7 was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

68-year-old Clinton Laing was sentenced Tuesday for aggravated indecent liberties with a child for crimes that occurred in 2015 and 2016. Before a plea deal, he faced four charges, including rape.

Prosecutor Alice Walker read letters from the victim and her mother, who both said they wanted Laing to serve a long sentence to pay for the pain he caused.

Laing’s attorney, Joshua Seiden, said his client was remorseful.

Laing registered as a sex offender after his guilty plea. If he gets out of prison, he will have to be on parole with electronic monitoring the rest of his life.

BOURBON COUNTY —One person died in an accident just after 9:30a.m. Wednesday in Bourbon County.

The Kansas Highway Patrol reported a 1988 Ford Ranger driven by Hunter Dean Kovacic, 15, Stark, was northbound on U.S. 69 five miles south of Fort Scott.

The pickup crossed the center line into the southbound lane of travel, sideswiped a northbound 2008 Ford F350 driven by Anthony Dean Alexander, 57 Parkville, and then struck a semi head-on.

Kovacic was pronounced dead at the scene and transported to Frontier Forensics. The semi driver Billy Swimmer Rabbit, 40, Pryor, OK., was transported to the hospital in Fort Scott. Alexander was not injured. The KHP did not have details on Kovacic’s seat belt usage.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A Kansas woman who already was celebrating the return of one cat that disappeared three weeks ago after an explosion at her home says she’s received a second “miracle.”

Ashley Nadeau posted to her Facebook page Tuesday that her cat, Kunimitsu, was found in a pipe at the site of her destroyed home in Topeka.

On Wednesday, she posted that she and a friend dug a second cat, Mr. Tibbs, out of a pile of rubble near the home.

The cats disappeared after a July 19 explosion that destroyed Nadeau’s home and damaged two other houses. Fire officials said the explosion was tied to a storm that downed a utility line.

Nadeau and her daughter left the house shortly before the explosion.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas’ most populous county left the rest of the state waiting nearly 13 hours until Wednesday morning for complete primary election results that proved to be pivotal in a high profile and close Republican race for governor — the second consecutive major election fumble by the affluent Kansas City-area county.

“I’m embarrassed for our county,” Johnson County election commissioner Ronnie Metsker told The Kansas City Star . “It’s embarrassing for our office, it’s embarrassing for me, for our team and for the vendor.”

In an odd twist, one of the candidates in the tight GOP race for governor, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, is also the statewide official responsible for elections. Under Kansas law, the secretary of state appoints the top elections officials in the four most populous counties, including Metsker in Johnson County. Kobach quickly came to his colleague’s defense and said the delays were not Metsker’s fault.

Kobach was leading Gov. Jeff Colyer by fewer than 200 votes after Johnson County’s results were finally tallied, and the race has not yet been called.

“There certainly were problems, including with the voting machines and things like that, but I have no reason to believe that there was orchestrated, or even unorchestrated, mischief,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas.

Metsker and other officials blamed the problems on long lines and delays updating data from the computer thumb drives that gather results from Johnson County’s new voting machines. This was the first election using those machines, which provide a paper audit trail and purportedly encompass the latest technology.

While nearly all of Kansas’ 105 counties had posted all results except provisional and absentee ballots by late Tuesday, Johnson County’s returns were just trickling in and weren’t completed until nearly 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Johnson County also had significant delays reporting results in the November 2016 election, which Metsker at that time blamed on a software malfunction. The old touch-screen voting machines used in that election were 14 years old, among the oldest still in use in the country and left no paper audit trail.

In May, the Johnson County Commission approved the purchase of 2,100 voting machines at a cost of $10.5 million, the newspaper reported.

Election Systems & Software, the voting equipment vendor, said in a statement that the delay in Tuesday’s primary in Kansas was due to slow processing on encrypted thumb drives and that the accuracy of the results was “never in question.”

“Johnson County followed proper procedures in conducting their election,” the company said. “ES&S takes accountability for and apologies for the slower than normal upload of results.”

On Wednesday, Metsker and Kansas election director Brian Caskey both cited the problem with thumb drives. Each thumb drive should have taken only seconds to upload information to the reporting software.

“What should have taken seconds at first took minutes, and then minutes turned into half hours,” Metsker said.

ACLU Legal Director Lauren Bonds, who helped man the election hotline, said Johnson County voters mainly called about voting machine malfunctions and the lack of preparedness by poll workers about what to do when that happens. Some sites did not have enough paper ballots as a backup. Johnson County did not appear to have “a contingency plan for these types of issues, which other counties seem better suited to handle,” she said.

The Johnson County election office said in a statement Wednesday it is confident in the integrity of the votes cast and the accuracy of the vote tabulation process. The county said it was working with the vendor to identify the cause of the delay, resolve the issue, and ensure the problem does not happen again.

Multiple voting sites that were supposed to close at 7 p.m. Tuesday did not close until about 8:30 p.m. because people were still in line. The turnout of nearly 30 percent of registered voters for a primary was also higher than anticipated.

“I don’t think they had enough machines deployed because it took voters longer to cast a ballot than they had planned,” Caskey said. “They had longer lines and they had a higher turnout than they had planned for.”

Metsker told the newspaper that in hindsight they should have had more machines and more poll workers.

Kobach appointed Metsker to clean up the mess left by Brian Newby, who departed in late 2015 to take the helm of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. An investigation by The Associated Press found Newby left behind a scandal in the Johnson County election office, where he was having an affair with a woman he promoted and used her to avoid oversight of their lavish expenses.

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WICHITA, KAN. – A former Wichita police officer pleaded guilty today and admitted he knew about illegal poker games, according to U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister.

Bruce Mackey, 46, Goddard, pleaded guilty to one count of misprision of a felony. Mackey admitted that while he was a police officer he knew and did not report individuals who were conducting a gambling business. During an illegal poker game in February 2014, Mackey told the organizers of the game that one of the gamblers was a Wichita police officer working undercover.

Sentencing is set for Oct. 26. He faces a penalty of up to three years in federal prison and a fine up to $250,000. The Wichita Police Department and the FBI investigated. Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Smith and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mona Furst are prosecuting.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — All Kansas high school juniors will be able to take ACT exams and assessments for free next school year, according to state education officials.

Department of Education spokeswoman Denise Kahler said that the free tests are being financed through additional funding from the state Legislature as part of its new school finance plan.

“We’re excited about it,” Kahler said. “We think it’s a great opportunity for our kids, and we’re very appreciative of the Legislature for allotting funding for us and providing this for our students.”

The ACT exam gauges a student’s readiness for success in college and covers English, math, reading and science. The ACT WorkKeys assessments measure essential workplace skills such as mathematical reasoning and comprehending work-related reading materials. The exams will be administered statewide in February.

Some Kansas school districts have previously funded ACT exams for students. The ACT also waives fees for students who can show an economic need. Students otherwise pay $50 for the ACT exam and an additional $16.50 for an optional writing assessment.

State officials said they’ll recommend, but not require, that all juniors take both tests. Officials are also encouraging seniors who didn’t take the tests last year to do so this year.

Students’ ACT scores last year fell to their lowest point in five years. About 29 percent of Kansas high school graduates who took the ACT in 2017 scored at the college-ready benchmark on all four subjects, down from 32 percent in 2013. The national average is 27 percent.

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