(Updated to reflect comments from Metsker)
Ronnie Metsker has resigned as Johnson County election commissioner, ending several years of turmoil in the voting office marked by prolonged vote counts in 2016 and 2018.
Metsker, a former Johnson County legislator and former chair of the Johnson County GOP, was appointed to run the office in 2016 by former Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Metsker replaced former Commissioner Brian Newby, who left to lead the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Metsker was the county’s ninth election commissioner.
The secretary of state appoints the election commissioners in the state’s four biggest counties: Johnson, Wyandotte, Sedgwick and Shawnee.
Secretary of State Scott Schwab issued a brief statement Thursday morning, but did not go into any detail about what led to Metsker’s resignation.
“We are grateful for his service and leadership and wish him well on his future endeavors,” Schwab said.
“Until a permanent replacement is named, the Johnson County Election Office will be jointly managed by county employees under the supervision of the secretary of state’s office.”
In a short interview with the Sunflower State Journal, Metsker couched his resignation as a natural evolution that followed making technological improvements to the office.
“We overhauled that office: every system, every process, every procedure,” Metsker said. “There were things 25 years old that had not been addressed.
“We got the work done and it’s time for me to move on to something else, so I resigned,” he said.
Metsker, who earned almost $107,000 a year, declined to say whether he was asked to resign or whether he anticipated leaving the position Thursday.
He deferred to the secretary’s comments and his own statement. His immediate future was unclear.
“This is a very taxing and draining position. It’s a meat grinder of a job,” he said. “I’ll probably take a few days, regroup and reassess where I am in my life and then I’ll re-engage in some way. I don’t have any immediate plans for what’s next.
“I live life to the full and something will be next, I’m just not sure what it is at the moment,” he said.
The secretary of state’s office hopes to open the application process for the position later Thursday. It is expected it close Jan. 6.
During the last three years, Metsker has battled several controversies, including lengthy delays counting ballots in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2018 when the Republican primary for governor hung in the balance.
Last year, the state had to wait almost 13 hours after polls closed until Johnson County’s returns were completely tallied.
While almost all of the state’s 105 counties had posted their results by the end of Election Day, Johnson County’s results weren’t done until about 8 the next morning.
The lengthy recount came during an extraordinarily tight gubernatorial primary in which the outcome of the race between Kris Kobach and Jeff Colyer was in doubt.
At the time, Metsker blamed the problems on long lines and delays updating data from computer thumb drives that collected results from the county’s new voting machines.
“I’m embarrassed for our county,” Metsker said at the time. “It’s embarrassing for our office, it’s embarrassing for me, for our team and for the vendor.”
The county later announced it had worked out a bug in the election system that led to the extensive delay in counting votes election night.
The county said the manufacturer of the voting machines — used for the first time in 2018 — had rewritten software code, which was blamed on the slow reporting of results on Election Day.
But in 2016, the election office grappled with similar delays when it also was the last county to post its results a day after the election.
The delay in 2016 was pinned to a software glitch and the fact that the election office was flooded with paper mail-in ballots in the days leading up to the election.
The controversy wasn’t limited to ballot counting, however.
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Johnson County in an effort to make public a list of voters whose advanced ballots were rejected because their signature didn’t match their voting record.
The ACLU also wanted a list of voters who had cast provisional ballots in the August primary in the lawsuit brought against Metsker.
Johnson County District Judge David Hauber found that Metsker’s refusal to make available the list of voters casting provisional ballots violated the state’s open records law.
More criticism surfaced earlier this year when a Johnson County polling place was moved from a private school to a Roman Catholic church attended by a candidate who was running against a rival who was openly gay.
County election officials said the relocation of the polling site was routine, pointing out that the school location suffered from heating and electrical problems.
