I’ve never understood why counties (or the Secretary of State) do not publish summaries of Kansas overseas voters at election time, since this is a category of voters very different from all others. More information about the voting process from authoritative sources is always helpful.

What are the numbers for overseas voters in Kansas? Are they big? Are they small? 

The US Election Assistance Commission recently released its 306-page Election Administration and Voter Survey (EAVS) 2024 Comprehensive Report with national and state details from the Nov. 2024 US general election. County details are available in a separate EAVS data file.

Chapter 4 of the EAVS report gives state overview details of military and overseas voting, which are called “UOCAVA voters.”

Congress passed the Uniformed and Oversees Citizen Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) in 1986 establishing procedures for absentee voting overseas by US citizens both for the military and other citizens abroad.

Most reporting about UOCAVA only mentions military voting, but since 2014 less than half of UOCAVA voters are in the military. 

In 2024 only 26.3% of UOCAVA voters were in the military nationally.

UOCAVA voters from Kansas mirrored the national numbers with 25.1% from the military and 74.9% overseas Kansas citizens.

Read the full story, with graphs and links, at the Kansas Informer opinion page, https://kaninfo.com/opinion/over-there-over-there-overseas-voters-from-kansas-made-their-voices-heard-in-2024/. UOCAVA Table 3 shows 1,327,324 Ballots transmitted and 806,743 ballots returned in 20224. For Kansas, 5,619 ballots were transmitted and 5,081 were returned. Another table shows Kansas counties with 20 or more UOCAVA voters; Barton County had 29.

Reprinted from the Kansas Informer. Earl F. Glynn is a mostly-retired data scientist, scientific programmer, software engineer and physical scientist living in the Kansas City metro area, and the publisher of the substack Watchdog Lab.