Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer said Friday that he’s “not entirely” comfortable with the current vote counting process in the state’s gubernatorial election.
“I want to make sure that all of the provisional ballots are counted appropriately where there are the issues there, such as independents who can become Republicans, who were given a provisional ballot — those ballots must be counted,” Coyler said in an interview on Fox News.
“Any ballot that was in the mail on Tuesday needs to be counted and it has until the end of the day to arrive.”
Colyer’s comments come amid a neck-and-neck primary race between him and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach for the GOP nomination for governor, with Kobach clinging to a 0.04 percentage point lead as of Friday morning. Later Friday, vote counts continued to fluctuate and absentee ballots were still being counted, but Kobach continued to lead Colyer by a margin of 110 votes, according to unofficial, updated vote totals from Kobach’s office.
In his Fox News interview on Friday, Colyer also accused his opponent’s office of “instructing counties not to count ballots that are in the mail.”
“The issue is this, though, when a judge recuses himself, he doesn’t just recuse himself from the counting of the jurors’ votes, he recuses himself from the instructions. And Secretary Kobach’s office was instructing counties not to count ballots that are in the mail, and those clearly have to be counted under Kansas law,” Colyer said.
Kobach’s office did not immediately return CNN’s request for comment on Colyer’s accusation that he had instructed counties not to count ballots that are in the mail.
Kobach said Thursday that he planned to recuse himself from his role overseeing the primary following Colyer’s call for him to do so.
Colyer issued a public letter on Thursday evening calling for Kobach to step aside from overseeing the final stages of the vote count in their race and defer to the state’s attorney general.
“It has come to my attention that your office is giving advice to county election officials — as recently as a conference call yesterday — and you are making public statements on national television which are inconsistent with Kansas law and may serve to suppress the vote in the ongoing Kansas primary election process,” Colyer’s letter read. “Accordingly, I hereby request that you recuse yourself from rendering further advice in these matters and that you designate the Attorney General of Kansas to provide this function.”
Colyer later said he appreciated Kobach’s statement that he would recuse himself, but it “probably should have happened a long time ago.”
