Dear Ellis County Commissioners Haselhorst, Schlyer and Roths:

This letter is to ensure that you are aware of the unreasonable, unreliable and dangerous machine voting in Ellis County elections and ask that you agree to budget only for paper ballots. Please do all in your power to persuade the County Clerk to scrap any plan to use machines.

The last election highlighted this issue. It was discovered that the existing machine-based voting system was expensive, not well-maintained, easy to hack and unnecessary.

See the 2007 Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing (EVEREST)” study initiated by the Ohio Secretary of State due to public concerns regarding election equipment such as used in Ellis County. This review was performed by three different well-respected bodies and all three identified and confirmed critical flaws in terms of security and reliability.

The EVEREST study reports that election systems in question, “uniformly failed to adequately address important threats against election data and processes. Central among these is a failure to adequately defend an election from insiders, to prevent virally infected software from compromising entire precincts and counties, and to ensure cast votes are appropriately protected and accurately counted.”

The study makes it abundantly clear that the voting equipment, and others, are at the very least insecure and pose many dangers to both voter privacy and election accuracy.

Ellis County is not immune to these dangers. In the 2018 Kansas House of Representatives election for the 111 th District, it was realized that there were large discrepancies in certain voting districts that almost never happen. Precinct reports came back showing that voters within certain precincts would vote for a certain candidate around 65-70% of the time on paper and in that same precinct the voters supposedly voted for that candidate as low as 43% of the time via machine. Ellis County showed signs of major anomalies in voter behavior and any political expert or analyst would tell you that many of these events just do not happen on their own. Sadly, because of the system used, nothing could be done.

At the very best, the machines, having been sloppily handled, not properly calibrated, not recently maintained, and demonstrably inaccurate, were the cause of deep distrust in the system. The solution is not another expensive set of machines. It is, very simply, to do as we did for decades, conduct our elections using paper ballots.

Ellis County deserves an election free of skepticism and irregularities. When a voter casts their vote, they want to feel like the vote is being properly counted, they want to know that their voice is precisely heard and for this to happen, we need to use an election system that is reliable and accurate. Paper ballots have never resulted in any significant question of the accuracy of election results here.

In “How Voting-Machine Lobbyists Undermine the Democratic Process” an article by Sue Halpern published January 22, 2019 in The New Yorker, Halpern explains many of the multiple issues that arose in Georgia and Delaware because of choosing to stick with machine voting equipment and allowing salesmen and lobbyists to control the voting process,

“Georgia’s Secure, Accessible & Fair Elections Commission voted to recommend that the state replace its touch-screen voting machines with newer, similarly vulnerable machines, which could be produced by E.S. & S. at an estimated cost of a hundred million dollars. In doing so, the panel rejected the advice of computer scientists and election-integrity advocates, who consider hand-marked ballots to be the “most reliable record of voter intent,” and also the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which recommended that all states adopt paper ballots and conduct post­-election audits. The practice of democracy begins with casting votes; its integrity depends on the inclusivity of the franchise and the accurate recording of its will. Georgia turns out to be a prime example of how voting-system venders, in partnership with elected officials, can jeopardize the democratic process by influencing municipalities to buy proprietary, inscrutable voting devices that are infinitely less secure than paper ­ballot systems that cost three times less.”

Elections conducted by vote machine systems come at a great cost and even greater risk. Evidence suggests that through systems like we have now, elections can be bought and stolen, and through paper this is just not possible.

Oregon is the “gold standard” when it comes to voting procedures. It performs an entire election, with 2. 7 million registered voters, all by mail because its elected officials, both Republican and Democratic, agreed that the cost is low, and the risk of hacking or tampering is even lower. Not only has going paper created a stronger line of defense against hacking and election fraud, Oregon is also having tremendous success in Voter Turnout and has even seen its demographic least-likely to vote, voters 34 and under, cast votes in record breaking fashion.

Ellis County has the opportunity to become the “gold standard” for Kansas counties and show that a safe and affordable election is possible, even in the face of growing technological concerns. By going paper we will be eliminating the threat of cyber hacking and tampering with our elections, gaining the potential to increase Voter Turnout and saving Ellis County money while doing it.

Although Ellis County has set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace our current voting equipment, blindly deciding to replace it with a newer yet just as vulnerable system is not the answer. Do not allow this mistake to be made. Officials from various states are promoting going paper because it is the safest and most cost-effective form of voting and Ellis County needs to as well.

I ask that you use your budget process to make it clear to the County Clerk that the money presently earmarked for yet another recipe for election malpractice be used to pay down the Ellis County deficit, instead. To paraphrase Everett Dirksen, Republican Senator, “a thousand dollars here and a thousand dollars there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

This is your chance to show that fiscal conservatism starts at the local level. Do the taxpayer, the voter, and all citizens the favor of safeguarding their right to have their votes counted properly while safeguarding their tax dollars, too.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this.

John Bird, Hays

SB 142 passed out of the Senate this week and has headed to the House for debate. This bill appropriates funds to the K-12 base aid for FY 2020 and FY 2021.

The legislation supplements the state’s $525 million, five-year investment that passed last year, with a series of additional $90 million bonuses during the next four years. SB 142 was crafted to comply with the Kansas Supreme Court’s instructions to add an inflation adjustment. We passed this with the belief that these additional dollars would finally settle the ongoing lawsuit. This is the bill Governor Kelly proposed to settle our lawsuit.

The State School Board also endorsed this bill. Last week the schools involved in the lawsuit changed their mind on the amount of money that we were adding for additional funding and are now asking for additional funds above the $90 million.

SB 22 was sent to the Governor’s desk last week for her signature. An update on SB 22, which was originally introduced in response to the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017, and the revenue windfall Kansas is expected to receive because of federal tax reform. SB 22 addresses both individual and corporate taxes by decoupling state law from federal law provisions.

The bill will provide individuals with the ability to itemize when using the federal standard deduction on their tax return. SB 22 provides Kansans with the right to deduct interest on their mortgage, property taxes and health care expenses. The bill also provides incentives for businesses to invest and create jobs in Kansas since it places Kansas on par with surrounding states that have already decoupled from federal law, increasing Kansas’ competitiveness. Kansas is one of seven states that hasn’t decoupled. If SB 22 does not get signed into law, businesses are expected to get hit with $137 million in state income taxes and individual taxpayers would pay an extra $50 million to the state. There were two amendments added to SB 22 by the House.

One amendment provided a 1% reduction in the state’s 6.5% sales tax on food. The food sales tax reduction is expected to provide a $43 million reduction in sales tax, beginning October 1st. The second amendment was an Internet sales tax amendment that requires out-of-state vendors to pay sales tax. Online sales tax is expected to generate about $21 million annually. This will be Governor Kelly’s first opportunity to keep her campaign pledge to not raise taxes.

The Senate passed Sub SB 69 that authorizes an independent $1 million study of retail rates charged by public utilities. This legislation was created in response to Kansas having some of the highest utility rates in the region and is intended to provide information to the Legislature in order to protect ratepayers.

I would like to thank everyone who stopped by the Capitol and my office last week.

I am honored and grateful to represent the 40th Senate District of Kansas. Please do not hesitate to contact me by e-mail at [email protected] or call me with your questions and concerns. My office number is 785 296-7399 or my cell is 785 899-4700. If you are in Topeka stop by my office at 236-E.