COLUMBUS, Kan. (AP) - The former Cherokee County clerk responsible for changing voter registration status of more than 4,800 voters denies any wrongdoing and says she was communicating with the Kansas Secretary of State’s office during the process.
Cherokee County Clerk Rodney Edmondson announced Tuesday his office recently discovered that about 4,838 voters may have had their statuses improperly moved from “active” to “canceled” between Dec. 1, 2010, and March 1, 2011, while Crystal Gatewood was county clerk.
Edmondson said state policy requires clerks’ offices to mail cards to verify if a person has moved out of the county before their status is canceled. If the voter returns the mailer and says he or she has moved the registration can be canceled. If the mailer is not returned, the clerk’s office can remove the voter if they don’t vote in the next two state or federal elections in that county.
Edmondson said no such mailers were sent during the 2010-2011 purge of voters.
“It was just a general order that if they haven’t voted in the last two elections, cancel it,” Edmondson said. “That was the instruction they were given.”
Gatewood, however, said she followed procedures and was in “constant” communication with the Secretary of State’s office during the purge.
“I had contact with them through the entire time after the (2010) federal election because you cannot work on the rolls during a federal election. All counties do that,” Gatewood told The Pittsburg Morning Sun (https://bit.ly/1n8cNL8 ). She said she had “daily” calls with employees in the Secretary of State’s office.
“They would review it all the time to make sure everything was done the way it was supposed to have been done. You don’t do this unless you get instructions, then you follow those instructions to a ’t.’ I followed all the laws and all the rules. It’s a very tedious thing to do. Everything was done according to direction I got from the Secretary of State’s office,” Gatewood said.
She also said her office sent “mailers all the time. I don’t know how many there were, I just know we sent out a lot.”
Bryan Caskey, with the Secretary of State’s elections division, said in an email that although there was contact between their office and Gatewood during the 90-day period, they have no “specific knowledge” that Gatewood received any instructions to cancel voter registration without following procedures. He also said there is no indication the voter registration changes affected any election’s outcome
Kay Curtis, spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office, said department employees would not have instructed Gatewood to remove names without following longstanding procedure.
“That wouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t be fine. It didn’t happen,” Curtis said Thursday. “What it comes down to is if any registered voters were cancelled for just not voting and no other reason, then the proper procedure was not followed.”
She said her office and the county would work to see that anyone who was improperly removed would have their voter status corrected.
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Information from: The (Pittsburg, Kan.) Morning Sun, https://www.morningsun.net
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