Kansas abortion foes will go door to door confronting voters after recount proves they lost

Anti-abortion activists threatened to carry out a door-to-door investigation after a recount proved again that Kansas voters overwhelmingly backed an amendment to preserve abortion rights.

Nine of the state's 105 counties recounted their ballots and found 87 fewer votes in favor of preserving those rights and six more in favor of stripping those from women in the Aug. 2 election where 922,000 votes were cast on the issue, and the election denier and anti-abortion activist were ordered to pay nearly $120,000 for the hand recount they requested, reported The Kansas City Star.

“It looks insidious," said state Rep. Stephanie Clayton (D-Overland Park). "It’s a two-pronged attack. It’s attacking our election system and it’s attacking, specifically, the counties that didn’t vote the way that they wanted them to. They’re creating unnecessary work for our already overburdened election workers in what I see as an effort to put democracy itself at risk.”

The recount was requested by Melissa Leavitt, a Colby woman who has testified before the state Legislature about 2020 election conspiracy theories, and bankrolled by longtime anti-abortion activist Mark Gietzen, whose Kansas for Life group targeted George Tiller's late-term abortion clinic before he was murdered.

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“The next step is to check the registrations of the people who they say voted,” Gietzen said. “I don’t care whether they voted yes or no, it doesn’t make any difference to me. I want to know if a human being voted. So we’ll be visiting homes to see if anyone lives there – maybe 10 out of every precinct.”

Gietzen insists he would not pay about $31,800 for a recount in Sedgwick County, where officials missed a deadline for recounting after finding about 400 ballots had not been categorized by precinct, but he and Leavitt raised about $50,000 toward the statewide recount, and he paid the remainder with money from his own retirement account and a credit card for the Kansas Republican Assembly, a hard-right alternative to the GOP.