Who Wins Countywide Office?

Brian Amos

Associate Professor, Wichita State University

March 21, 2025

Kansas has five offices that nearly all counties elect: attorney, clerk, register of deeds, sheriff, and treasurer. All of these officers serve four-year terms, and are up for election on the same cycle as the president. Since we just had a new set chosen last year, I thought it'd be interesting to look at the demographics of who serves in these roles.

A couple caveats. I am looking at who was elected in November 2024; there have already been at least a couple resignations, so the information is not current. Also, some counties didn't have elections for all five offices last year. Wyandotte, with its consolidated structure with Kansas City, holds elections in odd years with the rest of the state’s city elections. Johnson County only elects its sheriff, while Riley County doesn’t have a sheriff but elects the other four offices. In addition to Johnson and Wyandotte, Douglas, Reno, Sedgwick, and Shawnee do not have elected county attorneys. The only other exception for 2024 was Lane County and its clerk: no one filed to run, even as a write-in candidate, so a clerk was appointed after the election.

Some notes on the table:

• Number of Candidates on the Ballot: Most local elections are uncontested, and this is true of the countywides. Only one register of deeds race in the state had more than one candidate on the ballot, and a few attorney and clerk races had none -- the winner was a filed write-in candidate.
• Party: Kansas is a Republican state, and many of the Democrats are concentrated in just a handful of counties (two of which, Johnson and Wyandotte, mostly aren't in this dataset). All of Douglas County's officers are Democrats, but the remaining ones seem more or less random. Trego County, which went 85% for Trump last year, happens to have Democrats as clerk and sheriff. I haven't done a deep look into this, but my sense, given the lack of competition in these races, is that there is some degree of merit-based selection in choosing these officers. Outgoing officers train deputies to take over who then become the only candidate to run, or they may even retire early and make the recommendation for who should replace them.
• Gender: Election science is one of my main subfields of study, so I already knew that local election officials like Kansas's clerks were mostly women, but I was still surprised at how overwhelmingly so they were, and that the pattern applied to registers of deeds and treasurers. Sheriffs are the reverse trend, while attorneys are the most balanced, which is still not very balanced.
• Age: There is some variation here, but not a lot. The outliers are interesting to look at: the oldest countywide officer is Zilpha Rosel, Stevens County's register of deeds, who has been in office for 56 years!
• Residence: State law only requires sheriffs to be residents of their counties, but that is still the norm for clerks, registers of deeds, and treasurers. The big outlier here are county attorneys. This is in part due to the lack of lawyers in many parts of the state - apparently Hodgeman and Wichita County have no residing attorneys at all. A couple of county attorneys don't live in Kansas, but instead just over the border in Missouri (they're just required to be eligible to practice law in Kansas).
• Number of Counties Served: In smaller counties, being county attorney does not come close to being a full-time workload, so some attorneys hold the position in multiple places. (These officers were double- or triple-counted in the other statistical categories.)