Nearly a dozen Wichita polling places will not be available for the March special election on a proposed 1% sales tax.
The announcement, made Friday, is expected to impact about 26,000 voters. Each city council district has impacted voters, but the largest group of voters being directed to alternative voting sites live in District 1.
Here are the impacted voting sites:
Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Laura Rainwater said after the initial announcement last week, she and other election employees were inundated with calls and comments. Some accused her and Wichita city council members of a voter suppression conspiracy, others asked her to cancel the election.
“This was not done maliciously or with the intent of manipulating the outcome of the election,” Rainwater said during a press conference Monday. “No one is at fault. It is just one of the challenges with special election administration we have — we are at the mercy of polling sites and their availability.”
Rainwater said that when Wichita city officials reached out in November about the potential of a special election, there was already talk that some voters would need to use alternative voting sites.
About 530 voters live on the edge of the city, where their addresses make them city residents but their precincts vote in nearby communities like Goddard or Maize. Rainwater said it costs about $1,200 to open each polling place. For locations like the Maize city building, where only two registered voters are Wichita residents, it was an easy decision to reroute those voters, she said.
Rainwater said she and her staff were surprised when they began reaching out to the other 70 polling sites within Wichita and heard from a number of locations that they wouldn’t be able to host voting on the March 3 date.
Some locations, like Grace Presbyterian Church and New Life Covenant Church, had other events or commitments scheduled. Locations like St. Anne Catholic Church and Holy Cross Lutheran School had a school day scheduled.
Others have longer standing issues with hosting voters. The Westlink Church of Christ building was sold and will no longer be a voting site, and the Heart of Christ Church has maintenance issues that make it difficult to support voting activities.
An added cost
The Sedgwick County election office now needs to notify voters in the 26 impacted precincts. Rainwater said her office plans to launch a major mailing campaign and that voters should get a notice with ample time before election day.
That mail campaign comes with a cost. The informational postcards will add about $20,000 to the cost of the election, bringing Wichita’s total cost to about $170,000.
Wichita city officials said the cost of the election will be covered from the city manager’s contingency budget. The 2026 budget allocated $288,320 to that fund.
Wichita is covering the cost of the election entirely because it is a special — or off-cycle — election. Wichita and the surrounding communities typically divide and then pay a portion of the election costs for primary and general elections.
Rainwater said that her office has systematically added both regular and advance voting locations in order to make voting more accessible for Sedgwick County residents. She encouraged voters to again make use of advance voting and said she was trying to mitigate any difficulty for voters with the changing locations. The office plans to supply voting sites taking on new voters with additional voting machines and election staff and volunteers.
“We don't like to move voters,” she said. “It's a hassle for us and it's a hassle for them, and it can be confusing, and we get that.”
Room to reconsider?
Rainwater said with the cost, the need to redirect voters and fast timeline, she’s had people ask her to cancel the election.
“I can't cancel it,” Rainwater said. “I didn't call for this election, I can't cancel this election. So it's going to move forward, unless I get notified by the city that they want to cancel.”
The election commissioner said time is running out to postpone or cancel the election if Wichita city officials decide they want to make that call.
Ballots for Wichita residents in the military and currently overseas will be mailed out on Friday. The City Council would need to hold a special meeting in order to vote to cancel the election before Friday.
Once ballots are mailed out, the election is live and cannot be canceled or postponed, Rainwater said.
A race to the polls
Timing for the election came at the request of Wichita Forward, the nonprofit group proposing the citywide sales tax. In early December, members of Wichita Forward told the city council that a March 3 election was the only way to use revenue from the sales tax to help support Second Light, the city’s multi-agency center and homeless shelter.
Wichita city officials allocated $14 million to Second Light. About $8 million of that amount went to renovations of the former Park Elementary School building that houses the shelter and $5 million went to continued operations of Second Light. That money was part of the city’s pandemic era American Rescue Plan funds and is set to run out in October.
Steve Dixon, chair of Second Light’s board of directors, told council members in October that the shelter is currently serving between 200 and 300 people a night, bringing the shelter’s yearly budget to about $4.5 million.
Wichita Forward expects the sales tax, if approved, to generate about $850 million over seven years. The nonprofit’s ballot measure would direct up to $150 million to establish a fund that would support Second Light operations and other housing initiatives.
