Masterson's bid to catch Holscher hinges on ballots he wanted scrapped | Opinion
As regular readers of my column know, I have quite the appetite for irony. And irony doesn’t get any more delicious than when someone tampers with voting rules to try to gain a partisan advantage, gets overruled in court, and then the original rule turns out to be their last, best hope for political survival. Enter Senate President Ty Masterson, stage right. As of this moment, Masterson, the Republican candidate for governor, trails his Democratic opponent Sen. Cindy Holscher by a paltry 5,578 votes out of more than 1.1 million cast. The only plausible scenario in which Masterson can overtake Holscher is if late-delivered mail votes break his way. The irony here is that if Masterson had had his way, those votes he now needs would have ended up in dumpsters behind election offices across the state, uncounted, unrecorded and unceremoniously forgotten. A little background: In 2017 the Legislature, by a bipartisan and near-unanimous vote, passed a bill allowing ballots to be counted if they’re postmarked by Election Day and delivered to the election office by the Friday after the election. At the time, it was seen mostly as an accommodation to voters in sparsely populated rural sections of Kansas,
