Ruth Meier, from Silver Lake, Kan, votes at the Prairie Home Cemetery building, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2014, in Topeka, Kan. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Topeka ? The state of Kansas has added 10,591 more voters to its registration rolls in the last two years, with Democrats seeing the largest growth.

But Wyandotte County, a traditional Democratic stronghold and the third largest county in the state, has lost 7,009 registered voters, most of them Democrats.

Those figures are raising new questions about how hard the Democratic Party is working to maintain its strength there, which could have a direct impact on how competitive the party will be in the 2016 elections.

Wyandotte County Election Commissioner Bruce Newby said the decline was due in part to routine maintenance of voter registration rolls that involves purging the names of voters who have moved out of the county. But he also chided both political parties for not doing enough to register new voters.

“We do everything we can to register people, but I don’t see the political activity in our county that used to be here — people in the community going out and giving out voter registration applications,” he said.

Bruce Newby is not related to former Johnson County Election Commissioner Brian Newby, who is now executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and the defendant in a federal lawsuit involving voter registration in Kansas, Georgia and Alabama.

Bruce Newby was appointed to his job in Wyandotte County by former Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh.

But Cheyenne Davis, a field worker for the Kansas Democratic Party, blamed the problem on the state’s new law requiring people to show proof of U.S. citizenship in order to register, a task that she said is more difficult in Wyandotte County than in other parts of the state.

“The problem is that it is so very difficult to register voters in areas with more transient communities,” she said. “There are a lot of housing developments there that cause registration to shift.”

Davis said that as part of her job, she lived in Wyandotte County for eight months in 2015, working full time for the party, attending community and neighborhood events and trying to get people registered.

“The door-to-door method is not as effective for voter registration because still, with the proof of citizenship component, if you ask somebody to go into their home and get that, you have to build the connection first for them to trust you to do something like that, which is why I would meet them to make multiple contacts before we would actually receive the proof of citizenship.”

Newby said his office, like all other county election offices, routinely cleans its registration rolls of voters who have moved out of the county, and those who officials believe have moved out and who haven’t voted in the last two federal election cycles.

By law, he said, whenever officials believe a voter has moved out of the county, they send a letter to that address asking the voter to confirm whether he or she still lives there. Voters are stricken from the rolls if they acknowledge they’ve moved away, or if they fail to acknowledge and also do not vote in two consecutive federal election cycles.

The decline in registered voters in Wyandotte County has occurred even as the population of the county has been growing, and nearly all of it has been among registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters.

According to figures from the Kansas Secretary of State’s office, there were 8.5 percent fewer voters in Wyandotte County on July 1, 2016, than there were exactly two years earlier.

Just over half of the decline can be attributed to a loss of registered Democratic voters, and 49 percent is due to a decline in unaffiliated voters.

There are only 25 fewer Republican voters in Wyandotte County than two years ago.

That is the complete opposite of registration trends statewide, where total voter registration has grown 0.6 percent over the same period. Growth in Democratic Party registration accounted for more than half of that growth, while Republicans accounted for a little more than 40 percent.

There was a net decline of 379 people registered as unaffiliated.

Davis said she believes much of that was due to different party rules for voting in the March 5 presidential caucuses. The Kansas Republican Party required people to be registered as Republicans well before the caucus date, while the Kansas Democratic Party allowed same-day registration and changes of party affiliation at the caucus locations.

In Douglas County, registration has grown by 2,906 voters, or 3.9 percent, over the last two years. Nearly all of that has been due to growth in Democratic registration and a decline in unaffiliated voters, while Republicans saw an increase of 115 voters, accounting for about 4 percent of the growth.