How significant is Kansas’s resounding rejection of a state constitutional amendment that would have paved the way for a highly restrictive abortion ban?
On the one hand, the vote of 59% against to 41% in favour represents a remarkable achievement for the state’s Democrats and reproductive justice advocates. Grassroots educational and ‘get out the vote’ efforts roundly quashed the Republican attempt to sneak the amendment through in a late summer primary election.
Nationwide, primary elections typically attract low voter turnout, and in this case, many independent voters – those not registered as members of either of the US’s two major parties – may not have initially known they were allowed to vote on the ballot initiative, since Kansas does not allow independents to vote in its closed partisan primaries. It is particularly impressive, then, that almost one million people voted – Kansas’s highest primary turnout since at least 2010.
