This is an opinion column. It is one person’s read of a pending criminal case, not legal advice or a prediction of any outcome. Mika Milburn-Kee is presumed innocent and has the right to contest the charges in court.

The jury trial for Bourbon County Commissioner Mika Milburn-Kee is scheduled to begin July 6, 2026 and to last three days, with a pre-trial conference set for June 26. She is being prosecuted not by the local county attorney but by the Kansas Attorney General’s office, on two misdemeanor counts stemming from an October 25, 2025 incident in the commission meeting room while it was in use as an early-voting site:

• Count 1 — Interference with the Conduct of Public Business in a Public Building, K.S.A. 21-5922(a)(5). A Class A nonperson misdemeanor carrying up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.
• Count 2 — Disorderly Election Conduct, K.S.A. 25-2413(c) — the polling-place “three-foot rule,” which makes it an offense to come within three feet of an election-board table without authority. A Class B nonperson misdemeanor carrying up to 6 months and a $1,000 fine. Under K.S.A. 25-2432, a conviction on this count would force her to forfeit her office.

For background on the charges and the security-camera footage at the center of the case, see our earlier reporting on the jury-trial schedule, the video of the incident, and a step-by-step walkthrough of how the county runs an election.

What makes this trial so unusual

The fascinating thing about this case is how hard it is to find an example that tells you how it might go. In nearly every comparable situation, the accused takes a deal of some kind. By the time the Attorney General is confident enough in an election case to bring charges, I can’t find a single Kansas example of someone who decided that fighting it in front of a jury was worth the risk of losing and possibly going to jail. As FortScott.biz has documented in a review of similar prosecutions, every comparable case that could be found ended in a plea or a diversion. None went to a jury verdict. That makes Milburn-Kee’s decision to demand a jury trial genuinely unusual.

The diversion that probably isn’t coming

The best possible outcome for Commissioner Milburn-Kee would likely have been a diversion — the kind offered to Meghan Blubaugh in her 2024 Sedgwick County case, where she refused to turn a campaign T-shirt inside out while voting. Blubaugh’s deal required about $160 in court costs and completion of a county election-worker training. A diversion is a deferred-prosecution agreement that ends in dismissal rather than a conviction if it’s completed successfully. It would not have triggered the forfeiture-of-office statute. In other words, a diversion might have let Milburn-Kee keep her commission seat.

The catch is timing. Diversions are typically offered early. In the Blubaugh case, the diversion order was filed the day after her arraignment. We are well past that point in Milburn-Kee’s case, which makes a diversion now highly unlikely. A plea deal, on the other hand, often comes together late in the process, so that option may genuinely still be on the table.

What a plea might actually look like

Because no comparable Kansas case has gone all the way to a verdict, it’s hard to say what sentence the Attorney General would push for if Milburn-Kee lost at trial. As a rule, prosecutors ask for harsher penalties when a defendant forces a full trial, while the penalties attached to negotiated pleas tend to be relatively light.

The most useful data point is the recent case of Joe Ceballos-Armendariz, the former mayor of Coldwater, who in April 2026 pled guilty to three counts of the very same statute charged in Milburn-Kee’s Count 2 — K.S.A. 25-2413. In exchange, the state dismissed six felony counts. His sentence: a $2,000 fine plus costs, six months in jail per count (suspended), and a year of probation. His case is not a clean parallel — he was negotiating down from felonies, and non-citizen-voting issues raised stakes that don’t apply here — but it is the clearest recent example of how this particular election statute gets resolved in practice: with a plea, and with jail time suspended.

Why going to trial looks risky

Having watched the actual video evidence in this case, taking it all the way to a jury without some kind of deal looks like an extraordinarily risky move. Unless Milburn-Kee’s attorneys (the Leawood criminal-defense firm of Bath & Edmonds) see a nuance in the election law they believe will virtually guarantee a not-guilty verdict, it is hard to imagine a plea isn’t high on the list of options they are weighing with her.

My best guess is that the defense is using the cost and uncertainty of a three-day jury trial as leverage to negotiate the most favorable plea possible. But that theory weakens the closer we get to July 6. Plea agreements let the state conserve resources — accepting a lighter sentence from someone who admits guilt so prosecutors can spend their effort on the defendants who insist they did nothing wrong that the Attorney General wants to make an example out of. The closer a case gets to trial, the more work the Attorney General has already sunk into it, and the smaller the resource-saving benefit of offering a lenient deal becomes. At some point the calculation stops being about conserving effort and comes down to one question: how confident is the state that it can win in front of a jury?

What the record shows right now

Jury trials are unpredictable, but they still turn on the facts and the law. The defense requested and received the state’s roughly 161-page discovery file on May 28, and the original complaint listed 15 witnesses for the prosecution. Requesting that discovery triggers a limited reciprocal obligation: the defense must let the state inspect any documents or objects it intends to introduce as evidence at trial. So far, nothing of that sort has appeared on the public docket.

For readers who want the commissioner’s own perspective, FortScott.biz has published her letter to the editor. The election-room dispute also resurfaced at the June 15 commission meeting.

The bottom line

If other similar cases are any guide, this case will be settled with some sort of plea deal before the jury, but anything is possible. Milburn-Kee may become the rare Kansas defendant who bets on a jury in an election case.

Being charged with a crime is not the same as being found guilty. The defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven otherwise.

FortScott.biz publishes opinion pieces with a wide variety of different views. Letters can be submitted to [email protected] for potential publication.