Published list deletes candidates
Novel action occurred despite no change in law
Staff writer
For the first time in collective memory, Marion County has deleted precinct committeeman and committeewoman candidates from its legally required public notice of candidates in the August primary.
Their names and addresses were included in what the county clerk’s office initially submitted for publication.
But an hour before deadline last week, County Clerk Ashley Herpich wrote: “I found out this morning that we do not have to publish the precinct offices per KSA 25-209.”
The comment was puzzling. KSA 25-209, the law requiring publication of candidate names and addresses, has not changed in more than a decade.
Moreover, a subsequent check of kansaspublicnotices.com found that the vast majority of other counties continue to publish the names this year.
The check identified only four other of the state’s 105 counties that failed to publish committeeman and committeewoman candidates for the upcoming election.
Committee candidates also were included on a duplicate copy of Marion County’s candidate list that the same law requires the county to post on its website.
Asked last week to explain the deletions, Herpich this week referred the Record to Bryan Caskey, deputy assistant secretary of state for elections. Calls to Caskey were not returned Tuesday.
The Record also contacted Lawrence attorney Max Kautsch, whose practice focuses on issues of open government and public notices.
Kautsch pointed out that KSA 25-208 states that candidates for “all county and township officers and precinct committeemen and committeewomen” must file with their county clerk.
KSA 25-209 goes on to state that the county clerk must publish a list of such candidates for three weeks in the official county newspaper.
One part of the statute states that clerks must publish the names of each candidate for “national, state, county, and township office.”
This might be interpreted to exclude committeeman and committeewoman candidates.
However, the next section adds that clerks must publish “in addition thereto, the names and addresses of all persons from whom valid nomination papers or declarations have been filed.”
“It is difficult to understand how that language could reasonably be interpreted to mean that publishing the names is not required,” Kautsch said.
Committeeman and committeewoman positions are unlike most elected positions. They take office immediately and generally are perceived as having largely social or ceremonial functions.
However, they also play a pivotal role in filling vacancies in more traditional offices. In fact, the majority of constitutional officers in Marion County, including Herpich, took office for the first time not by being elected but by being chosen by committeemen and committeewomen to fill vacancies.
In many elections, no one files for a large number of committeeman and committeewoman positions. When that happens, whoever is elected chairman by remaining committee members has sole authority to name people to fill committee vacancies.
In some cases, more than half of committee members voting to fill a vacancy for county commissioner or other county office might have been hand-picked by a single person.
For the Republican Party in Marion County, that person has been Rose Davidson, also an organizer of the ultra-conservative Patriots for Liberty group.
If she is re-elected after the August primary, she may have as many as 23 committee seats to fill because no one filed and the county has opted not to publish who has and hasn’t filed.