August 2022 Constitutional Amendment on Abortion

Posted On June 29, 2023

In the August 2, 2022 Midterm Primary Election, Kansas voters were asked to vote on a Constitutional Amendment about abortion protections in the state.

The question before voters, in the form of a confusingly worded constitutional amendment, was whether to end the right to abortion in Kansas by voting “yes” or preserve the right by voting “no.”

Kansas already has abortion limitations in law, including:

Abortion is banned at 22 weeks and later
Patients forced to wait 24 hours after counseling (not required to be in-person) to obtain an abortion
State Medicaid coverage of abortion care is banned except in very limited circumstances
Private health insurance of abortion is banned except in very limited circumstances
Parental consent or notice is required for a minor’s abortion
Only physicians can provide abortions and not other qualified health care professionals
State provides protections from harassment and physical harm for anyone entering an abortion clinic

While the Amendment was placed in the primary election, the largest concern was voter turnout as this was not a Presidential Election year and Independent voters rarely vote in a primary. As the second largest voting bloc in Kansas, Independent voters can easily swing an election.

There are approximately 644,000 women of reproductive age in Kansas and in 2020 approximately 8,200 abortions occurred in state. For context, there were 34,376 reported live births in 2020 and an unknown number of miscarriages or stillbirths.

On June 24, 2022 the United States Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs Decision which overturned 50 years of precedent in Roe v Wade. This decision effectively let the states decide how and when abortion is legal, throwing the country into a cluster of confusion and chaos.

Kansas was the first state to clearly put abortion rights on the ballot post Dobbs.

Results of the Vote

Kansas voted to protect abortion by a landslide 60-40 vote on August 2, 2022.

Turnout was incredibly high with 942,851 votes counted on just this amendment. The most recent comparable midterm primary was in 2018 and only 473,000 voters turned out to cast a ballot. That’s nearly double the turnout in 4 years! That’s even more voters than the midterm general election from 2018.

Comparing turnout by demographics, we know that the turnout rate for women under 25 registered to vote was higher than the turnout rate for men of all ages.

But the polls said…

One thing to remember when pollsters are calling voters, asking how they intend to vote: if you’re a newly registered voter, you’re not on those lists yet. Additionally, younger voters are less likely to answer a phone call from an unknown number.

Early Voting Data

Kansas enjoys early voting and before the polls opened on August 2nd, there were already 300,000 votes cast early (a record!). In those votes, 58% were submitted by women.

Registration Insights

If we take a big step back, let’s see how registration changed post-Dobbs. After June 24, 2022, voter registration in Kansas increased over 1038% and those voters were overwhelmingly women, democrats and under 30 years old.

Pre-Dobbs new voters in Kansas went GOP by 19 pts, post-Dobbs they went Democrat by 8 pts. According to one pollster “the landscape changed on June 24th.” 70% of new voters registering after that date were women. Again the pollsters point out “I can’t recall having seen voter registration deviate from the mean nearly as much as we’ve seen in Kansas since June 24th.”

In Kansas, 30% of the women who registered pre-Dobbs were under 25 years old. Post-Dobbs, 52% of women’s new voter registrants were under 25.

What can we take away from this election?

When we show up and vote it impacts our daily lives and that’s real power.
Young people are registering to vote in record numbers but still need encouragement to turnout for every election.
The people of Kansas want to retain their rights.
Kansas shocked the nation on August 2nd in a good way! Let’s keep them surprised.