KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ The Republican race for Kansas governor just got tighter.
Gov. Jeff Colyer's campaign spokesman said Thursday that 100 votes for Colyer have been found in a western Kansas county, meaning Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is now only 91 votes ahead in the GOP race for governor.
Thomas County Clerk Shelly Harms confirmed in an email that Colyer received 522 votes on Election Day. The county had originally reported 422 votes as the governor's total.
Thousands of provisional ballots statewide have yet to be counted, however, and the final outcome of the primary race remains in doubt.
"This discovery of 100 votes for Gov. Colyer that had not previously been counted highlight the need to thoroughly check and double check each vote and to make sure that every legitimate vote is counted in this race," Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said.
Bryan Caskey, the state director of elections, said in a phone call that the missing votes were discovered through the Secretary of State's Office's routine verification process that asks each county to confirm its reported vote total.
He said that other counties also had errors in their Tuesday night results, but that those errors did not affect the governor's race. He said that the office would update its results page Friday.
"We will adjust at some point. We're not doing it on the fly," Caskey said.
He said that the Friday totals would also include mail-in ballots, meaning the gap between the two candidates could possibly narrow or widen again.
The Friday totals will not include provisional ballots. The state's two most populous counties, Johnson and Sedgwick, will review a combined 3,700 provisional ballots when they both hold their canvassing meetings on Monday.
But even then the overall vote total in the race will remain unknown.
Two of the state's other most populous counties, Wyandotte and Shawnee, won't hold their meetings until Thursday of next week. Counties are allowed to continue canvassing until Aug. 20.
