KS-Gov: On Thursday, election officials in Thomas County announced that they'd discovered an error by the secretary of state's office that had initially cost Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer 100 votes in Tuesday's incredibly tight GOP primary with Secretary of State Kris Kobach. With the mistake corrected (the state transcribed Thomas' tally for Colyer as 422 votes rather than 522), Kobach's lead over Colyer goes from 191 votes to just 91. These kinds of typos are fairly common in elections, but they don't attract much public attention unless the race is tight.
No matter what, it's going to take a while for Republicans to learn who won on Tuesday. There are still between 8,000 and 10,000 provisional ballots left to count (though not all of them will be for the GOP primary). State law also allows mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive by Friday, so we still don't know how many of those votes are also still out. The director of Kansas' election office say there will be a new statewide vote tally Friday that will include mail-in ballots, but not provisional votes.
The counties will be holding a canvas to review their provisional ballots over the next several days. Johnson and Sedgwick will review their combined 3,700 provisional ballots on Monday, but two other large counties, Wyandotte and Shawnee, won't hold their canvasing meetings until Aug. 16.
There is no automatic recount in Kansas, but the trailing candidate may request one after counties have counted their mail-in and provisional ballots: The deadline to make this request is Aug. 17. The state would have until Sept. 1 to finish the process.
As we've written before, Kobach would oversee a recount, and he says he doesn't have any plans to recuse himself from it because it would be carried out by the counties. However, multiple legal and political experts argue that Kobach should step aside if there's a recount so there's no appearance of improper interference. Whomever emerges with the GOP nomination when all is said and done will face Democratic state Sen. Laura Kelly and wealthy independent Greg Orman.