Spanish-language voter guides distributed by the Kansas secretary of state’s office did not match the English-language version and contained errors that could have resulted in people being unable to register and vote. The errors added fuel to complaints that Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s voter registration policies pose hurdles for some voters, including minorities. Ongoing lawsuits challenge the proof-of-citizenship requirements he wrote and shepherded through the Legislature. Craig McCullah, who is in charge of the office’s publications and a spokesman for Kobach, accepted responsibility for the errors and said they resulted from a clerical mistake in updating the guides for this year’s elections. “It was an administrative error that I am diligently working to fix,” he said.
McCullah said discrepancies in registration deadlines were corrected in the online version of the guide in the past 24 hours, and the rest of the text is being sent to a professional translating service to eliminate mismatches between the English and Spanish versions.
The problem went public in a post on the Daily Kos website by Democratic consultant Chris Reeves of Overland Park. Reeves said a native Spanish speaker alerted him to the errors when he stopped by Garden City to check in with local Democrats while on a trip to western Kansas.