On Primary Election night 2018, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach spoke twice on the phone with Johnson County Election Commissioner Ronnie Metsker.
It’s not surprising that the Secretary of State was seeking an update on the status of the vote count. It was, after all, the second major election in a row in which Johnson County, the state’s most populous county, had been unable to post vote tallies in a timely manner. And as Secretary of State, Kobach was in charge of reporting the statewide vote total.
The software failure that led to the long delay in vote totals being reported has been well documented. But for some Johnson County voters, it was the political ties between Kobach and Metsker that raised the most concerns as uncertainty surrounded the outcome of such a close race. Kobach, a former chair of the state Republican party, had appointed Metsker, then the sitting chair of the Johnson County Republican Party, to the six-figure position in 2016, and then reappointed him just weeks after Kobach emerged with a narrow victory over Gov. Jeff Colyer in the primary.
(Read more: Shawnee Mission Post – Community news and events for northeast Johnson County)