Vote yes on constitutional amendment

A constitutional amendment stands to save nearly a million taxpayer dollars by eliminating a costly and largely pointless bureaucratic exercise.

The amendment, which stops the census adjustment for Kansas legislative apportionment, is on ballots statewide Nov. 5. Kansans should vote yes on this common-sense measure, passed with broad bipartisan support and favored by Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab.

The constitutional amendment is an effort to fix a problem Kansas has been working on for decades: how to count Kansans to apportion seats in the Kansas Legislature. Kansas did its own, duplicated version of the federal census until 1988. That year, Kansans wisely passed a constitutional amendment requiring the state to use the federal census to apportion seats.