Kentuckians will be voting this fall on two constitutional amendments. This is the view approaching the Sugar Maple Square polling site in Bowling Green, May 21, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

A grassroots advocacy group has filed a lawsuit against Kentucky election officials alleging the state’s process for removing voters from rolls violates federally protected voting rights.?

The state’s top election official responded that undoing the law during a presidential election year would “sow chaos and doubt.”?

Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) filed the lawsuit last week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky against Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams and the State Board of Elections, which includes Republican and Democratic members.?

The complaint alleges that Kentucky’s election law, which was changed in response to the coronavirus pandemic and became permanent in 2021, violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. KFTC says the federal act requires registered voters who have moved to receive notice in writing to confirm their address and have time to respond before they are removed from voter rolls. Kentucky’s law “flagrantly violates these requirements,” KFTC argues, by not giving voters notice before removal.?

Adams issued a statement Tuesday saying he plans to defend the law in court. The 2021 changes, known as House Bill 574, were signed into law by Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.?

“Kentucky’s elections are a national success story,” Adams said. “Three years ago, Kentucky enacted a bipartisan law to prevent voting in more than one state in a presidential election. Now that a presidential election is underway, a fringe left-wing activist group is trying to undo that law and sow chaos and doubt in our elections. We believe voters should vote in only one state, and we expect to prevail in court.”

In addition to the removal process, the 2021 state law also has provisions for no-excuse in-person early voting and updates to regulations for absentee ballots.?

The secretary of state also said that 4,362 individuals had been removed from the voter rolls in June. Of that group, 3,030 were deceased, 603 were convicted of felonies, 554 had moved out of the state, 78 voluntarily deregistered, 52 were duplicate registrations and 45 were adjudged mentally incompetent.

KFTC is asking the court to permanently enjoin election officials from canceling voter registrations without following provisions required by federal law.?

The group’s lawsuit also says it registered more than 2,000 new voters during last year’s governor’s race and plans to “directly register even more prospective voters due to the presidential race.”?

KFTC will hire 15 people across the state for this year’s voter registration program, which includes field training and webinars.?

Founded in 1981, KFTC’s mission is to “challenge and change unfair political, economic and social systems by working for a new balance of power and a just society.”

Read Kentuckians for the Commonwealth v. Michael Adams

(Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Kentucky election officials on Tuesday told lawmakers they know of no instances of noncitizens having voted in Kentucky. Nonetheless, Kentucky is among a number of states where voters in November will be asked to ban noncitizens from voting in elections.?

The officials, including Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, also described existing safeguards to ensure that only U.S. citizens cast ballots. They spoke during a meeting of the Interim Joint Committee on State Government, whose main agenda item was “Kentucky Agencies and Illegal Immigration.”?

Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled General Assembly approved putting a constitutional amendment on the ballot specifying that noncitizens of the U.S. cannot vote in Kentucky. Similar measures will appear on the November ballot in Idaho, Missouri, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Republicans in Congress are pushing to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Critics say the attention paid to something that rarely, if ever, happens is a political ploy to tap into anti-immigrant sentiment and motivate Republican voters.?

The proposed constitutional amendment to clarify that noncitizens of the U.S. cannot vote in Kentucky elections will appear on the November ballot alongside another — the amendment to allow the General Assembly to fund nonpublic schools, which was a Republican priority in this year’s legislative session.?

Though noncitizens can vote in few local elections, GOP goes big to make it illegal

Adams said election laws to prevent noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections have enjoyed “wide consensus.” He pointed to a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 that prohibited noncitizens from voting in federal elections.

“Kentucky’s Constitution implies — although it does not state — that noncitizens cannot vote in Kentucky’s state and local elections,” Adams said.?

He added that in his time as secretary of state, he had “seen no evidence that noncitizens have voted or attempted to vote in our elections, but that does not mean we should not be concerned about this issue and fail to take proper precautionary measures.” Adams was elected to a second term last year.?

Taylor Brown, general counsel for the State Board of Elections, said there are various steps in the voter registration process that deter noncitizens from registering. Anyone checking a box saying they aren’t a U.S. citizen is redirected to not register. Someone who lies or provides false information could face felony perjury charges.?

“In sum, (the) State Board of Elections cannot report any known encounters when an undocumented immigrant has successfully made it through the voter registration application process to become an active voter here in Kentucky,” Brown said. “That is not to say that it is impossible though.”?

Brown said a recent law passed by the legislature requires the Administrative Office of the Courts to provide various agencies, including the elections board, with a monthly list of people excused from jury duty for not being a U.S. citizen. A noncitizen found to have registered to vote would be purged from the voter roll and law enforcement could pursue criminal charges, such as perjury.?

Grant County Clerk Tabatha Clemons, president of the Kentucky County Clerks Association, said the group surveyed its members about cases of noncitizens successfully voting in Kentucky, but found none.?

“We had one county who reported having a person show up to vote who could not produce identification, and in turn, they were offered to go get identification or to have a hearing with the county board of elections — neither of which took place,” she said.?

Speaking about the voter registration process, Adams told lawmakers that Kentucky’s photo ID law was the “best tool in preventing noncitizen voting.” He added that he would support future legislation to allow the State Board of Elections to cross-reference Department of Motor Vehicle records with voter rolls to identify legal immigrants who may have registered to vote.?

In Kentucky, legal immigrants can get a driver’s license and would have a Social Security number to do so. A Social Security number is also needed to register to vote.?

“American elections are for American citizens,” Adams said. “Each of us takes an oath to support the Constitution of this commonwealth, and even now that constitution evinces a desire to prevent noncitizens from voting in Kentucky elections.”?

Tuesday is primary Election Day in Kentucky. (Getty Images)

Polls will be open Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. as voters choose nominees for president, Congress, the Kentucky General Assembly and many local offices.

Any voter who is in line by 6 p.m. will be allowed to cast a ballot.?

Kentucky does not have same-day registration. But if you registered to vote 29 days before the election and your name is not on the precinct roster, you may request a provisional ballot.

Proof of identification is required to vote in Kentucky. Accepted forms are a drivers license, college ID, military ID or another ID issued by the state or a county or city that has the voter’s name and photograph. Voters lacking ID can cast a provisional ballot. More details about voters’ rights can be found on the State Board of Elections website.

Mail-in absentee ballots must be received by the local county clerk before 6 p.m. on Election Day.?

Voters may report suspected election law violations and voting irregularities to the Attorney General’s Office via its Election Fraud Hotline. The hotline will be staffed on Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The number is 1-800-328-VOTE, or 1-800-328-8683. Suspected violations of election law also can be reported to the AG here The number of complaints logged by the hotline will be posted on the office’s website.?

For details about your local polling place, including an address, visit the State Board of Elections website and select your county. More information can be found at govote.ky.gov.?

To view a sample ballot, visit the secretary of state’s website.

Live election results will be available online from the State Board of Elections.?

A ballot drop box in Madison, Wisconsin, that has been put out of commission. Since 2020, drop boxes have become a target for many on the right, who argue that they were insecure and could allow for fraud — though very few examples have been found in Wisconsin or elsewhere. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

In Wisconsin, voters don’t yet know whether the ballot drop boxes that were in use in the state for years will be allowed this fall.

Georgians are waiting to find out whether much of their state’s sweeping 2021 voting law, which imposed a range of restrictions, will be in place.

In North Carolina, procedures for same-day voter registration and voter ID are still being fought over. And the rules to be used by election administrators to run Arizona’s vote also are up in the air.

With less than 120 days until some states mail out general election ballots, important voting regulations in nearly every major 2024 battleground remain the subject of legal battles. That means court decisions yet to come could go a long way toward determining the level of Americans’ ballot access.

They could also help determine the next president. A New York Times/Siena poll released May 13 found President Joe Biden leading or trailing narrowly in the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which together would likely be enough for him to win reelection, while former President Donald Trump leads more comfortably in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. The leading polling averages also show a very tight race.

Many of these high-stakes legal cases stem from lawsuits filed by Republicans or their allies, looking to impose tighter rules on the voting process to guard against fraud, which is extremely rare. Almost all the rest come from claims brought by Democrats or their allies, or by voting advocates, aiming to loosen the rules and expand access.

In a recent statement, Democrats called the GOP lawsuits “meritless,” and “designed only to try to undermine our democracy and voters’ confidence in it.” But federal courts have increasingly given respectful hearings to politically charged claims that many experts have called frivolous — meaning there can be few guarantees about how these cases will fare.

The uncertainty that comes with unresolved litigation could risk voter confusion in the fall, especially if there are late rule changes, some experts warn. But voting advocates say court rulings that favor voters are welcome, even if they come late in the game.

“I don’t think any voter is going to be confused or unhappy if the change in the rules favors their ballot being counted when it otherwise would have been rejected,” said Jon Sherman, the litigation director at the Fair Elections Center, a voter advocacy group.

The pileup of crucial cases in pivotal states is similar to other recent cycles. That means voting advocates on the ground have some practice at ensuring that voters get the most up-to-date information, said Hannah Fried, the founder and executive director of All Voting Is Local. The organization works with grassroots partners to protect and expand voter access.

“But it does get harder later on in the cycle,” Fried added. “And there’s a lot of litigation.”

Perhaps most striking, it means that, as an election with historically high stakes approaches, just how easy it will be for millions of Americans in pivotal states to cast a ballot and have it counted remains an unanswered question.

Here are some swing states and their biggest legal disputes:

Wisconsin

In the Badger State, which polls suggest could be closer than any other in this year’s presidential race, two key voting issues are still unresolved in the courts.

On May 13, the state’s Supreme Court began hearing a case in which progressive groups, now joined by the state’s Democratic attorney general, are challenging a 2021 decision that banned the ballot drop boxes that many voters had used for years to return mail ballots. At the time of that ruling, there were 570 drop boxes operating in the state, the Wisconsin Examiner has reported.

During and after the 2020 election, drop boxes became a target for many on the right, who argued that they were insecure and could allow for fraud — though very few examples have been found in Wisconsin or elsewhere.

Since 2021, the state Supreme Court’s majority has shifted from conservative to liberal, raising hopes among Democrats that the ban could be overturned.

A second ongoing case could turn out to be even more consequential, because it affects not just how easy or hard it is to cast a ballot, but whether certain votes will be counted at all.

Unlike in almost all other states, mail ballots in Wisconsin must be signed by a witness who can verify the voter’s identity, and the witness must provide their full address. In 2016, the state issued guidance that if a witness had left off a part of their address, like the ZIP code or town, local election administrators could fill it in if they could reasonably ascertain it. That allowed those ballots to be counted.

But in 2022, a Republican lawsuit led a state court to block that guidance, meaning those ballots — which could number in the thousands this fall, advocates estimate — are now at risk of being rejected.

A lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters charges that rejecting ballots based on immaterial factors like a missing ZIP code violates federal civil rights law.

“It makes no sense to reject the ballot when you can locate and identify the witness,” said Sherman, of the Fair Elections Center, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case. “You’re just rejecting it based on a technicality.”

A district court ruled for the LWV, and the case is currently on appeal.

Georgia?

The Peachtree State’s sweeping 2021 voting law imposed tighter rules on various aspects of the voting process, and made Georgia the poster child for a wave of concern about voter suppression after the 2020 election. Two important lawsuits spurred by the measure, both of which could have big implications for the mail ballot process, remain ongoing.

One, brought by voting and civil rights groups and consolidated from a group of similar suits, challenges several of the law’s planks, many relating to mail ballots.

Among them: rules limiting where ballot drop boxes can be placed and when they can be made available to voters; restrictions on who can help a voter return a mail ballot; and a requirement that mail ballots be rejected if the voter birthdate on the outer envelope doesn’t match with the voter’s registration record.

The suit also challenges the law’s assessment of criminal penalties on people who give food and water to voters waiting in line — a provision that has made the jump to popular culture among critics of the GOP’s strict voting polices.

A federal court has temporarily blocked some challenged provisions, and declined to block others. In February, the U.S. Justice Department asked to intervene on the side of the plaintiffs. The litigation is ongoing.

A separate lawsuit filed by civic engagement groups challenges provisions of the law that restrict their ability to help people apply for a mail ballot. The measure fines outside groups $100 for every ballot application they send to a voter who has already requested or received an application, and adds other rules to the process.

“(I)n some cases (the challenged provisions) are impossible to comply with or would present such prohibitively expensive financial burdens that some groups, like Plaintiffs…may have no choice but to cease their operations in Georgia altogether,” the groups bringing the lawsuit, who helped hundreds of thousands of Georgians to register in 2020 and 2021, allege in the complaint.

The Republican National Committee and other national and state GOP groups have joined Georgia in defending the challenged provisions. A trial took place in federal court last month, and a ruling is awaited.

Arizona

The Grand Canyon State was the closest in the nation in 2020. Now, Republicans and their allies have filed lawsuits against Democratic election officials there, mostly seeking stricter voting policies.

The Republican National Committee and state GOP are challenging the Election Procedures Manual, a list of rules for running elections released last year, as required by law, by Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

Republicans allege that the manual makes it too hard to remove voters from the rolls if they’re found to have said they’re a noncitizen when answering a questionnaire for jury duty; wrongly allows voters who haven’t shown proof of citizenship to vote in the presidential election and to vote by mail; doesn’t require election officials to do enough to find noncitizens on the rolls; and wrongly limits the public’s ability to view a voter’s signature to verify their mail ballot. The litigation is ongoing.

Another lawsuit, this one brought by a conservative legal group founded by the former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller, challenges election rules adopted by Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, as well as two other counties. One of its claims is that Maricopa’s placement of voting sites favors Black and Hispanic voters and discriminates against white and Native voters. It also charges that all three counties make it too easy for a voter to “cure” their mail ballot in cases when the signature on the ballot doesn’t match that in voter registration records.

A state appeals court paused the case on May 1. America First Legal did not respond to a message asking about their plans for responding.

North Carolina

Two important voting rules in the Tarheel State are still being hashed out in the courts.

A trial began May 6 in a challenge brought by the state NAACP to North Carolina’s voter ID law, which was passed in 2018. The lawsuit claims that the measure, which requires voters to present one of 10 forms of ID, discriminates against Black and Hispanic voters, who are more likely to lack ID.

An earlier restrictive voting law passed by North Carolina Republicans, that included a strict photo ID requirement, was struck down in 2016 by a federal judge, who ruled that it targeted Black voters with “surgical precision.”

Another lawsuit, this one filed by the progressive group Democracy NC, targets a different voting restriction — a provision of a state law passed last year that makes it easier for election officials to reject votes cast by voters who used same-day voter registration, if mail sent to their address is returned as undeliverable.

It isn’t yet clear whether the suit will be heard before the election. A federal judge last month declined a Republican request to put it on hold.

Michigan

The Great Lakes State has flipped back and forth in recent presidential elections and may again be pivotal this year. Several election cases are underway there, which could affect voters.

The RNC and state GOP are suing Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over guidance from her office instructing local election officials to give a “presumption of validity” to the signatures that people voting by mail must provide when applying for a mail ballot, and must also write on the ballot return envelope. The guidance violates the state Constitution and state law, Republicans allege.

Benson’s office has sought to have the case thrown out, claiming the plaintiffs “have not identified a single signature that they contend local clerks have been required to accept … that otherwise would not have been accepted.”

It isn’t known how many votes might be at stake, but in 2022, nearly 1.9 million Michiganders voted by mail — around 42% of all voters.

Two other lawsuits, one filed by the RNC and another by a conservative legal group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, accuse Benson of inadequate voter roll maintenance and aim to require her office to do more to remove names from the rolls. Fifty-three of the state’s 83 counties have more registered voters than eligible voters, the RNC claims.

A federal judge dismissed the suit filed by PILF, which has brought numerous similar lawsuits in other suits, mostly unsuccessfully. That ruling is currently being appealed. Benson’s office has asked a judge to dismiss the RNC suit.

Finally, Michigan GOP lawmakers are challenging reforms approved by voters via ballot measures in 2018 and 2022, which allowed early voting and no-excuse vote-by-mail, among other steps. Republicans claim the measures improperly bypassed the state legislature, which has exclusive authority to set voting rules — a version of the “Independent State Legislature Theory” that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last year.

A federal judge last month threw out the lawsuit, but Republicans filed an appeal May 3. Though experts see the challenge as a long shot, any unexpected ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could throw the state’s election into turmoil, given the popularity of early and mail voting.

Pennsylvania

Republicans in the Keystone State are also relying on the Independent State Legislature Theory in a lawsuit that challenges Gov. Josh Shapiro’s creation of an automatic voter registration system. That system was facilitated by a 2021 executive order issued by Biden, which gave states access to federal data to help set up such voting registration. Biden’s order is also being challenged.

The lawsuit claims that both Biden’s order and Shapiro’s creation of the AVR system — which fulfilled a promise he campaigned on — improperly sidelined the state legislature.

A district court dismissed the case, but last month Republicans filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. Most observers see that as unlikely. But, as with the Michigan case, any ruling blocking Pennsylvania’s AVR system could create barriers for many potential voters.

Also not entirely resolved is the status of mail ballots with missing or incomplete dates.

A 2022 RNC lawsuit seeking to have those ballots — which numbered over 10,000 in 2020 — thrown out was successful. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union filed their own suit seeking to reverse the ruling, which was rejected. The ACLU could still ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, or take the issue back to a lower court. But it looks likely that the ruling saying the ballots must be rejected will stay in place for the fall.

Nevada

Since 2020, the Silver State has been a hotspot for Republican efforts to stoke fears about illegal voting, based on little evidence.

The Republican National Committee and state GOP are suing Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, charging that the state is violating federal voting law by not doing enough to maintain accurate voter rolls. Three counties, the lawsuit alleges, have more registered voters than people eligible to vote, and two more — including Clark County, the state’s key Democratic stronghold — have implausibly high registration rates of over 90%.

Aguilar has called the suit “meritless,” saying the GOP’s claims are based on flawed data, and has sought to have it thrown out.

Conservative groups have in recent years filed numerous similar lawsuits aimed at forcing election officials to more aggressively pare the rolls, and most have failed.

New York

Unlike the other states here, New York isn’t a presidential battleground, but it contains several swing congressional districts that could help determine control of the House.

Voters in the Empire State face uncertainty thanks to a lawsuit filed by the RNC and other Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik, which challenges a Democratic-backed reform, passed last year, allowing voters to cast a mail ballot without an excuse. The plaintiffs allege the law violates the state constitution.

In 2020, when no-excuse mail voting was temporarily allowed because of the pandemic, nearly 2 million New Yorkers — over 20% of total voters — took advantage of it.

A district court dismissed the lawsuit in February, and an appellate court unanimously affirmed that ruling May 9. Four days later, Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016.?(Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

With U.S. democracy plagued by extremism, polarization, and a growing disconnect between voters and lawmakers, a set of reforms that could dramatically upend how Americans vote is gaining momentum at surprising speed in Western states.

Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016, when Maine became the first state to adopt it. But increasingly, RCV is being paired with a new system for primaries known as Final Five — or in some cases, Final Four — that advances multiple candidates, regardless of party, to the general election.

Together, proponents argue, these twin reforms deliver fairer outcomes that better reflect the will of voters, while disempowering the extremes and encouraging candidates and elected officials to prioritize conciliation and compromise.

Ultimately, they say, the new system can help create a government focused not on partisan point-scoring but on delivering tangible results that improve voters’ lives.

Alaska, the only state currently using RCV-plus-Final Four or Final-Five, appears to be seeing some benefits to its political culture already: After years of partisan rancor, both legislative chambers are now controlled by bipartisan majorities eager to find common ground and respond to the needs of voters, say lawmakers in the state who have embraced the new system.

A slew of other states could soon follow in Alaska’s footsteps. Last year, Nevada voters approved a constitutional amendment that would create an RCV-plus-Final-Five system — for the measure to take effect, voters must approve it again next year.

Efforts also are underway to get RCV-plus-Final-Five on Arizona’s 2024 ballot, and RCV-plus-Final-Four in Colorado and Idaho — where organizers announced Wednesday that they’ve gathered 50,000 signatures (they need around 63,000 to qualify). Even Wisconsin Republicans, who in the redistricting sphere have fought reform efforts tooth and nail, in December held a hearing for bipartisan legislation that would create RCV-plus-Final-Five, though its prospects appear dim.

Meanwhile, Oregon voters will decide next year whether to adopt RCV alone. And this year, Minnesota and Illinois lawmakers passed bills to study RCV, while Connecticut approved a measure that allows local governments to use it.

There are even flickers of interest at the national level. In December alone, two leading Washington, D.C. think tanks that often find themselves on opposite sides — the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Center for American Progress — each held separate panel discussions that considered RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five.

Katherine Gehl, the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation, and the designer of the Final Four/Five system, calls RCV-plus-Final-Five “transformational.” (Her organization now says advancing five candidates to the general works best, by giving voters more choices.)

“There’s a huge pressure on reformers to say, this is not a silver bullet,” said Gehl. “And OK, I get that.”

But, she added, “I think it’s as close to a silver bullet as you can come.”

Meanwhile, a backlash to reform is brewing, with several Republican-led states banning RCV in recent years. A coalition of national conservative election groups last month warned Wisconsin’s legislative leaders that RCV and Final Five are “intended to dramatically push our politics to the Left.”

Understanding the process

Here’s how RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five works.

In the primary election, candidates from all parties compete against each other, with voters picking only their top choice, as in a conventional election. The top four or five finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general.

In the general, voters use RCV to pick the winner. They fill out their ballot by ranking as many of the candidates as they want, by order of preference.

If no candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, the candidate who finished last is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ second-place votes are allocated. If there’s still no candidate with a majority, the process is repeated with the next-to-last candidate. This continues until someone gains a majority and is declared the winner.

Supporters of the system say the Final Four/Five primary gives a voice to a broader share of voters, while the use of RCV in the general helps ensure a fairer result. Under the current system, two similar candidates together may win a clear majority but split voters between them, allowing a third candidate to win with a minority of votes.

But even more important, many advocates argue, is how the two reforms together can change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under.

Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate.

Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue. It isn’t hard to find evidence for this lately, both in Washington and in state capitals across the country.

By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win.

Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.

“People do what it takes to get and keep their jobs,” said Gehl, the Final Four/Five designer. “So if you change who hires and fires, which is to say, November voters instead of primary voters, and you change the system so that there’s real competition in November every time, even once you’re an incumbent, that forces accountability.”

A success story from the Last Frontier?

The experience of Alaska, whose voters passed an RCV-plus-Final-Four system in 2020, offers an illustration.

At its first use in 2022, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an independent-minded Republican distrusted by the party’s conservative wing, was reelected. Mary Peltola, a moderate Democrat who kept in place her Republican predecessor’s chief of staff, was elected to the U.S. House, defeating Sarah Palin, the conservative Republican former governor. (Murkowski and Peltola endorsed each other).

Meanwhile, voters reelected Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a conservative Republican – suggesting, reformers say, that the system can produce a wide range of outcomes.

And more women ran in 2022 than in the five previous cycles combined — highlighting how allowing anyone to run, regardless of party, can boost opportunities for under-represented groups.

But the effect on how candidates and lawmakers have approached their jobs has been more dramatic still, advocates say.

Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican, told the Center for American Progress event that, after angering GOP voters by working collaboratively with Democrats, she lost her 2020 primary, held under the old election system, to a staunch conservative. Giessel had been in office since 2011.

Giessel said that when she ran again last year under RCV-plus-Final-Four, her campaign didn’t even buy the database showing voters’ party affiliations that most candidates rely on to identify supporters, because she needed to target voters of all stripes. Helped by being the second choice of many Democratic voters in the general election, Giessel won back her seat.

“You’re requiring us as candidates to be much more authentic,” said Giessel of the new system. “We’re not speaking to a party platform anymore. We’re speaking to the citizens.”

Giessel now leads a bipartisan majority coalition, formed within days of the election. Members have focused on consensus issues that are priorities for voters, including boosting education funding, lowering the cost of energy and passing a balanced budget.

“We have seen much more collaboration on the budget,” said Giessel. “There’s a much more open process now, understanding that everyone needs to have input.“

An analysis by the R Street Institute, a center-right Washington, D.C. think tank, found that Alaska’s new election system “gave citizens greater choice and elevated the most broadly appealing candidates, in turn improving representation.”

Reformers in Nevada — gearing up for next year’s campaign to pass RCV-plus-Final-Five a second time after it won with 53% of the vote last year — have noticed Alaska’s early success.

Over 40% of all registered voters in the Silver State aren’t affiliated with a major party, and the figure is growing. It was these voters’ frustration over being denied a voice in the state’s taxpayer-funded closed primaries that initially drove the push for reform, said Mike Draper, the communications director for Nevada Voters First, a political action committee that organized the ballot measure.

As in Alaska and elsewhere, there was also a related concern about politicians playing only to their base.

“Candidates and electeds, through no fault of their own, are not incentivized to … work to solve problems,” said Draper. “The primary incentive is to make sure they stay in the good graces either of the party, or of that fringe group that’s active in the primaries.”

Top figures in both major parties, including Nevada’s Republican governor and its two Democratic U.S. senators, oppose reform. A lawsuit brought by Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias that aimed to keep the measure off the 2022 ballot was rejected by a judge.

‘A scheme of the Left’?

Though elected Democrats in Nevada and some other blue states have come out against reform, the most vocal opponents have been red-state Republicans and national conservative groups. They argue it would confuse voters and further reduce confidence in election results.

Some even see a progressive plot. An October analysis by the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability called RCV a “scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats.”

Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota — all Republican-controlled states — have passed legislation in recent years to ban RCV. Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature also passed an RCV ban, but it was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

In Alaska, conservatives have launched a campaign to advance a ballot measure repealing their state’s reform. Palin, who has blamed the system for her loss to Peltola last year, calling it “wack,” is playing a prominent role in the effort.

Still, advocates say there are also signs of emerging interest among some Republicans in other states.

Last year, the GOP lost several winnable statewide races after primary voters nominated extremists like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona. Now, some in the party think reform could allow them to advance more electable candidates.

“Even among Republicans, I’ve had my fair share of conversations where they are starting to recognize that the system isn’t putting forward candidates who are necessarily the best general election winners,” said Matt Germer, an associate director and elections fellow at the R Street Institute.

“So there’s even some growing interest among Republican electeds to say, hey, what we’re doing now is not growing our party. And if we really want to change our country, we’re going to need to grow our party, and that means appealing to enough voters to win elections.”

Gov. Andy Beshear speaks on election night, Nov. 7, 2023, at Old Forrester’s Paristown Hall in Louisville. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

After the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed redrawn congressional and legislative districts Thursday morning, Gov. Andy Beshear said a constitutional amendment should be pursued but noted it would be “challenging” to pass through the General Assembly.?

Beshear, a Democrat, said in his weekly press conference Thursday afternoon that he had not read the entire 78-page opinion in full, but found the ruling “concerning” if the court ruled “that it’s OK to gerrymander on purely partisan intentions.”?

“That’s not the way that the government should operate and if it takes a constitutional amendment, I think we should pursue one,” the governor added.?

Democrats sued after the maps were approved by the Republican-controlled General Assembly last year. Beshear vetoed the maps.?

The Supreme Court affirmed a decision out of Franklin County Circuit Court that the maps, which will stay in place, were a result of? “partisan gerrymanders” but did not find them unconstitutional. Republicans in Frankfort quickly applauded the ruling.?

Beshear, who recently won reelection to a second term, referenced a line in the Court’s opinion which argues that voters unhappy with the maps can find remedies “in a constitutional amendment or expulsion of the perpetrators at the polls.” The governor, who is not a party in the lawsuit, argued districts were “redrawn to make it harder to vote people out.”?

“The ruling is what it is, and we’ll have to move forward,” Beshear said. “But we have got to get to a point where redistricting is about the people and not the politics, and trying to find a vehicle to do that.”?

The governor said “getting a fair redistricting constitutional amendment through would probably be really challenging,” because the General Assembly created the maps and the Supreme Court upheld them. However, Beshear added “that doesn’t mean that you don’t continue to try.”?

Beshear said Kentucky should have a non-partisan commission to oversee redistricting like some other states have, but such a way would need a constitutional amendment in Kentucky — which is put forth by the legislature.

A drone monitors a restricted area. Election denier Mike Lindell is touting the use of drone-mounted devices to monitor polling places. (Getty Images)

The Kenton County Board of Elections unanimously voted to explicitly disallow the presence of wireless monitoring devices at polling places on Election Day.?

The meeting’s topic came as the result of discussions that Kenton County Board of Election Chair Gabrielle Summe had at a recent county clerks meeting, where she heard about My Pillow Founder and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell’s efforts to hawk a device he contends can detect if a voting machine is connected to the internet.

“These are the kinds of things that keep me up at night,” said Summe, the Kenton County clerk.

“I just want to have a prepared way of handling this,” Summe added later in the meeting.?

Uneasily dubbed “WMDs” or “wireless monitoring devices,” the devices are about the size of a hardback novel and can be attached to flying robotic drones or carried by hand. Lindell first presented the device at a right-wing election conspiracy event in August, where he claimed that the devices could be used to uncover election fraud.?

“We’ve been told a lie over years now that the machines are not on the internet,” Lindell said at the event. “… What if I told you that there was a device that’s been made for the first time in history that could tell you that that machine was online?”

Lindell said the devices could be attached to flying drones and flown around polling places to scan the area for Wi-Fi signals and the devices connected to them. He turned one of the devices on at the event, which seemingly detected the audience members’ phone hot spots and other local signals before sorting them into categories. A projector showed the results on the wall behind Lindell.

Lindell claimed that the device would then send the collected data for additional analysis at a “command center” in an undisclosed location.?

It’s unclear from the video alone if the devices can actually detect Wi-Fi signals or if it was a contrivance of the presentation, but the board members all agreed that the usage of such devices at a polling place would be in clear violation of Kentucky law.?

“We can’t allow any chance of interference with the election,” said Kenton County Sheriff Chuck Korzenborn.?

Broadly speaking, photography and other media capture is not allowed at polling locations. Voters are allowed to bring in their smart phones to polling places, and they can take selfies with their ballots. News outlets are also allowed limited use of photography, but most other forms of media capture are illegal.?

Kentucky Revised Statute 117.236 states plainly:?

“No election officer, voter, or other person permitted by law within the voting room, except for challengers appointed under KRS 117.315, shall use paper, telephone, a personal telecommunications device, or a computer or other information technology system for the purpose of creating a checkoff list or otherwise recording the identity of voters within the voting room, except for the official use of the precinct signature roster that is furnished or approved by the State Board of Elections and is otherwise permitted by law.”

The election board will post this law and other prohibitions outside of polling places on Election Day to ensure that voters are apprised of the laws against election interference.?

“You can self take a selfie of yourself with your ballot. That’s it,” said Republican Board of Elections Representative Scott Kimmich. “Nothing else can be photographed. Nothing else can be recorded. And people need to know that. Otherwise, it’s voter intimidation or tampering with the election outcome, and they will be prosecuted.”

Election conspiracy theorists like Lindell have argued that voting machines, contrary to official statements, are connected to the internet, which allows nefarious agents to falsify election results. President Joe Biden’s victory against against former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election is a particular focal point for election conspiracies.?

Although individual cases of voter fraud do occur, most large-scale conspiracy theories that Lindell and his allies like to throw around have been discredited. Still, the theories continue to hold appeal in the right-wing of the Republican Party, and even some local candidates, such as former Erlanger Council Member Steve Knipper, who lost the GOP nomination for Kentucky secretary of state to incumbent Michael Adams this year, have openly endorsed claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.?

Voting machine vendors vary from county to county, but each vendor must pass strict federal and state guidelines before they can be used. Per Kentucky statue, all voting machines in the commonwealth are air-gapped, meaning they lack the technology for internet connectivity. The only three vendors certified in Kentucky are Hart InterCivic, Election Systems & Software and MicroVote. Kenton County uses Electronic Systems & Software machines, the marketing materials of which state they’re never connected to the internet.?

“We all feel very confident that none of our equipment is connected to the Internet or can be accessed by the Internet,” Summe said.?

In spite of this, the board members were aware that most polling places as well as some public places have Wi-Fi infrastructure.?

“That would be kind of hard not to say that any facility that has Wi-Fi available is not going to show up on a device that says there’s an internet connection,” Summe said. “So what is the true purpose of this?”

Summe and others thought that these devices, if they work, could be used to collect data and other information from voters’ smart phones.?

“That’s when I was concerned because the more I thought about it, I thought, well, is it going to interfere with what happens on election day?” Summe said. “Is it intended to modify something? Is it designed to come out with a specific result to prove something…?”

The board concluded that an official statement explicitly disallowing the use of the machines was warranted in case someone was caught trying to use one or if someone asked a poll worker if they could bring one into a polling place.?

The board canceled their normal meeting for next month due to its proximity to Election Day, but the board members will be available to the public all day on Nov. 7 to deal with any issues that may arise.?

To see deadlines on voting and get instructions on the different ways to vote, visit the Kenton County Board of Elections website. The final day to request a mail-in absentee ballot is Oct. 24, 2023.

This article is republished from LINK nky.

(Abbey Cutrer)

Pretend it’s the end of the 2024 presidential election. Either Republican Michael Adams or Democrat Charles “Buddy” Wheatley is Kentucky’s secretary of state, a job that includes overseeing elections in the Bluegrass State.

The losing candidate in the state’s presidential election calls Kentucky’s secretary of state and asks him to “find” enough votes to overturn the Kentucky results — and threatens him if he fails to do so.

That’s what former President Donald Trump, a Republican, did on Jan. 2, 2021, in a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in his unsuccessful bid to win another four years in the White House.

The call led to Trump’s indictment in Georgia for? interfering in the 2020 election.

“I would terminate the call,” said Adams, a Louisville attorney who is seeking another four-year term as Kentucky’s secretary of state on the Republican ticket.

“I would inform the attorney general. I would inform the FBI, basically any members of my bipartisan task force, state police and federal partners. I would make them aware and certainly notify my legal counsel. No good would come out of a call like that.”

Would he terminate the call even if the presidential candidate was his own party’s nominee?? Yes, said Adams.

It was inappropriate for Trump to have made that call to Georgia’s secretary of state, he said.

Democrat Wheatley, a lawyer and former state representative and fire chief of Covington, said he would tell the candidate — regardless of party— that Kentucky has reported its results and they are official by our state laws “and nothing will change because of that.”

Asked if Trump’s call was wrong, Wheatley said, “I think the Georgia secretary of state did the right thing.” Raffensperger opened up an investigation of the call and informed authorities about it.

Across the nation, the public office of secretary of state has taken on more consequence and visibility with recent election disputes.

Adams and Wheatley each say they are the best person to handle that job in Kentucky in their hopes of winning the Nov. 7 general election.

The secretary of state is Kentucky’s chief election officer, chief business official as keeper of start-up papers and other corporate records, and chief advocate for civic engagement. The job pays $148,108.56 a year.? It is a constitutional office and is often referred to as being on the “down ticket,” meaning it is below the power of the governor’s office.

For the race so far, Wheatley has raised more campaign funds —$165,692 — but Adams leads with receipts — $225,345. That is because Adams took out a $156,000 loan for his campaign, according to the latest records from the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance.

Here’s a look at some of the major issues in the race and the candidates’ views on them.

Making it easier to vote

On his campaign website, Wheatley says, “Kentucky is still one of the most restrictive voting access states in the Union. In 2022, we actually made it harder to vote. I will bring back more polling locations and precincts to make it easier to vote.”

Asked why he’s saying that, Wheatley said, “For several reasons, including we have only three early voting days, our polls close at the earliest time in the country at 6 p.m., felons can’t vote except for executive order, and we don’t allow independents to vote in the primaries.”

Wheatley is calling for “more poll locations, more poll workers and more access to the polls so our elections truly reflect the voters of Kentucky.”

He said in recent years that Adams has presided over a drastic reduction of polling places replaced by super center voting locations. “It’s really discouraging.”

Adams strongly disagrees with Wheatley’s assessment of voting in Kentucky.

“Kentucky makes it easier to vote than a lot of blue states on the East Coast. If it is restrictive in any way, it’s because Mr. Wheatley’s political party ran this Capitol and office for 100 years. It wasn’t until I won that we increased voter access. They did nothing.

“All his party ever brought to this office is corruption,” said Adams, referring to his predecessor, Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, who was fined $10,000 by the Executive Branch Ethics Commission for what the panel determined was improper use of voter data that benefited her and others. Grimes, secretary of state from 2012 to 2020, has denied any wrongdoing and said she would appeal the commission’s fine.

Adams said Kentucky is the only red and southern state to make it easier to vote in the last three years.

He said that came about because Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and he worked together during the COVID-19 pandemic to make voting easier. Their changes included early voting and more use of absentee ballots. The legislature later made those changes permanent though not as generous as they had been for the 2020 election during the first year of the pandemic.?

“That’s why I have broad support from both parties,” he said, noting that he took flak from some in his own party. One dubbed him “Benedict Adams.”

“My campaign welcomes support from all Kentuckians. I do not take the race for granted, nor should anyone who wants fair, free, accessible and secure elections.”

Adams ?said he would like to see more voting but several obstacles have to be overcome.

Adams noted that it’s becoming more difficult to find workers at the precinct polls and locations to conduct voting.

Adams said some churches have stopped being voting locations, especially since there was a constitutional amendment dealing with abortion on the ballot last year in conflict with their teachings.?

Some schools chose to no longer be voting locations after COVID-19, he said.

Adams also said he would like to see more early voting but that would require more personnel, especially in county clerks’ offices.

And the need has not been shown to have more voting days in primary or non-presidential general elections, he added.

About 45 percent of the vote cast in the 2020 presidential election came in early voting, said Adams, but last year only 15 percent of the voters voted early in the primary.

“There is no design on my part to suppress voters, just the opposite,” said Adams. “I am the father of early voting. My opponent likes to say I’m a voter suppressor.? That is ridiculous.? He lacks credibility. I have risked my neck to get people to vote.”

Adams’ freelance work

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported in January that Adams sometimes does outside legal work for Republican clients.

Wheatley said Adams’ freelance work is “a conflict of interest, sometimes with some seedy people.”

But Adams said the extra work only amounts to a few hours each week and does not interfere with his job as secretary of state.

“It takes zero hours from my state job,” said Adams.? “By the way, Wheatley also practiced law when he was a state representative.”

Allowing more felons to vote

One of Gov. Andy Beshear’s first acts as governor in December 2019 was to restore the right to vote for at least 140,000 former felons who had fully completed their felony sentences for nonviolent or nonsexual crimes. The number of people who have had their voting rights restored due to the order has now grown to 190,726, according to his administration.

Both Wheatley and Adams said they would encourage whoever is the next governor to continue that policy, maybe even pushing a constitutional amendment for it.

Both candidates also say they support giving independents the right to choose to vote in primary elections.

Wheatley’s job suspension as fire chief

At this year’s Fancy Farm picnic, Adams brought up Wheatley’s 2008 two-week suspension as Covington fire chief for violating city policy by consuming alcoholic beverages prior to operating a city-issued vehicle and wrecking it.

The Covington city manager said Wheatley in February 2008 was suspended without pay for two weeks after he crashed a city-issued 2000 Ford Crown Victoria in Hebron, totaling it head-on.

Wheatley had to make restitution to the city for the vehicle and lost a merit-based pay raise.

Wheatley said during a recent interview that he was never charged with any wrongdoing, but “simply made a mistake.” He said he has never been charged with any violation of the law in his life.

Wheatley also said if a similar incident had happened to Adams 15 years ago he would have not brought it up in this year’s race.

Adams said he did not believe that. He said the issue reflects on d Wheatley’s judgment while on the job.?

This was the scene last year on primary Election Day at Elkhorn Crossing School in Georgetown. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

In a matter of weeks, Kentucky voters will decide who will lead the state’s executive branch.?

The general election is set for Tuesday, Nov. 7. Most Kentucky voters will decide statewide office holders, though Fayette County voters in House 93 District can vote in a special election to fill the late Rep. Lamin Swann’s seat.?

Constitutional officers on the ballot include governor, lieutenant governor, agriculture commissioner, secretary of state, state treasurer, state auditor and attorney general. Primary elections were held in May.?

To find local polling locations that will be open on Nov. 7, visit govote.ky.gov.?

Register to vote

The deadline to register to vote in Kentucky for the general election is Tuesday, Oct. 10 at 4 p.m. local time. Voters may register online through the Kentucky secretary of state’s website.?

Absentee ballots

Kentucky voters may request absentee ballots online through the Kentucky secretary of state’s website. The online portal opened Sept. 23. It closes on Oct. 24. Eligibility requirements for a mail-in absentee ballot can be found on the State Board of Elections website.

Mail-in absentee ballots must be received by the county clerk by 6 p.m. local time on Election Day to be counted. Voters can find their local drop-box locations at govote.ky.gov.?

Early voting?

Early in-person voting begins in late October.?

Excused in-person absentee voting will be held Oct. 25-27 and Oct. 30-Nov. 1. Polling locations for these dates can be found on the State Board of Elections website. The board’s website also lists eligibility requirements for excused in-person voting.?

No excuse early voting is Nov. 2-4. Polling locations for these dates are listed on the State Board of Elections’ website.

(Abbey Cutrer)

Editor’s note: This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit?usdemocracyday.org.

For several years, Gregory and Wynella Bethards have worked at the polls on Election Day in Jefferson County.?

The Louisville couple said they enjoy being part of the process. Gregory said “it’s a civic duty, privilege and obligation to serve the community,” but there is some anxiety before voters come through the doors.?

Every Election Day begins early, he said. Election workers want to make sure everything, including voting equipment, is ready for when polls open at 6 a.m.?

Wynella added another possible curveball — maybe another poll worker “for some reason didn’t show up.”?

In recent elections, Wynella said she has noticed a drop in election workers, a trend seen by election officials across Kentucky. While health concerns prompted by the covid pandemic are a primary reason, some poll workers may worry about their safety following the contentious 2020 presidential election where Donald Trump has pushed the lie that the election was stolen from him through election fraud.

“I think Kentucky’s elections are safe and secure. I know the clerks do everything they can to ensure that the election officials, the poll workers are kept safe during their time at the polls,” Karen Sellers, State Board of Elections executive director, told Kentucky Lantern.

‘It is a big job’

Sellers said most poll workers are retirees. However, amid the coronavirus pandemic, that age group may have concerns about their health and want to avoid possible exposure to illness.??

In the 2020 presidential election year, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams agreed to changes to Kentucky’s election procedures in the wake of the pandemic. No-excuse absentee ballots and extended early voting periods were available to voters, meaning that fewer polling locations were needed on Election Day.?

Sellers said election workers take their jobs “very seriously.” State law requires party parity at each precinct, meaning an equal number of registered Democrats and Republicans.?

“It is a big job. And it’s an important job. And we want everyone to serve, if they can,” she said. “And if they can, reach out to their county clerk and let them know that they’re interested in serving.”?

Andrew Imel, who is in his first term as the Greenup County clerk, said his office made it through the primary election “just on the skin of our teeth.”? The county has 16 polling locations and? needs at least 64 workers, not counting alternates, to meet the minimum four-person per poll staffing level. The office had only one alternate poll worker left.?

Before he was elected in November 2022, Imel said he noticed a local shortage of poll workers as well as a lower voter turnout.?

“We had a lot of veteran poll workers that personally called me and said they’re no longer (able to) help and stuff like that,” Imel said. “So we really did more or less run into a wall with that.”

Bobbie Holsclaw, who is serving her seventh term as the Jefferson County clerk, said her office sees a shortage of poll workers “just about every election” going back several years. Her office needs between 2,300 and 2,400 poll workers to oversee each election.

Party parity is a challenge for the county, she said. Jefferson County, which has more Democratic voters, has struggled with recruiting Republicans. However, local parties are required by law to provide names of possible workers to county clerks.?

Election officials interviewed by the Lantern say heightened election scrutiny may contribute to their difficulty of recruiting election workers.?

Holsclaw said “there’s some truth to that” and added that some churches and businesses no longer want to be polling locations.

Since the results of the 2020 presidential election, the nation has seen a rise in election doubt. Despite Democrat Joe Biden’s win,? Trump, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, continues to push false claims of victory and cast doubt on the security of elections. According to an August CNN poll, 61% of Americans said Biden did legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency, while 38% believe that he did not.

Sellers said Kentucky has not had serious threats at polling locations. She said county sheriff departments work closely with county clerks during elections for security.??

Holsclaw also said Jefferson County has not had serious security problems on Election Day.?

In Greenup County, election doubt has not been a concern, Imel said.?

Recruitment efforts

For those who do the job, Sellers said they find it “rewarding.”?

“If you do it once, you understand what an important job it is for the voter and the voting experience and helping people be able to cast their ballots and have a voice in an election,” Sellers said.?

Before Election Day, workers are required to take a four- to six-hour training course. On the day of the election, they may have to answer questions from voters about using machines or other questions about the process. Some workers also assist with early voting days ahead of Election Day. Counties also recruit alternates to work as back up.?

“It’s a 14-hour day for a person to work the polls. They usually have to come at 5 a.m. They are responsible for assisting and setting up the equipment,” Sellers said. “Really, they’re the first person that greets the voter and assists them with the voting experience.”?

Poll workers are paid, but their wages vary from county to county. When Holsclaw first started as clerk, the pay was around $100 for the day plus $25 for training, and increased to $200 a day several years ago. Last year, the pay rose to $300 in Jefferson County, a move that Holsclaw said increased interest.?

Holsclaw said that her office has “tried very hard” to get younger people involved, but “you don’t see the enthusiasm or the excitement among younger people as you have the older generation.” In addition to working closely with local political parties, Holsclaw’s office tries to recruit election workers by visiting community groups, like veterans at the local VFW, talking with college students or going to local fairs and festivals.?

“I don’t think really that Kentucky is any different than any other states (in that regard),” she added. “I think it’s kind of a trend that’s across the country.”

Imel said his office relies on other poll workers to recruit, spreading the need through word of mouth as well as posting information on social media. The election board also speaks with other committees.?

Looking ahead, Imel said his office is thinking about how to improve voter turnout, which includes taking steps like getting people registered to vote.?

“Once they’re registered to vote, it would more or less be a domino effect. We’ll just keep them in the circle if they want to be a poll worker.”?

As for the Bethards, being an election worker is a way to serve their community. For people who are considering being a poll worker, Wynella said not to be intimidated by the training because they will likely work with other experienced poll workers on Election Day.?

“I just enjoy being part of the process,” Wynella said. “I like to see who all gets out and votes.”

Attorney General Daniel Cameron addressed supporters at the Galt House in Louisville after easily winning the Republican nomination for Kentucky governor on May 16, 2023. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)

Denied records it sought in 2020 from Attorney General Daniel Cameron about a Ballot Integrity Task Force he co-chairs, American Oversight, a national advocacy group, pressed on.

And that set up an ongoing legal battle that open records advocates say was unnecessary and shows Cameron is unwilling to release even the most routine documents related to his office.

American Oversight “got stonewalled by the attorney general,” said Amye Bensenhaver, co-director of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition, which tracks access to public information on its Facebook page.

Under Kentucky law, the attorney general is the first stop for anyone who believes they were wrongly refused public records. It’s up to that office to review the dispute and issue a formal legal opinion.

That means that after Cameron’s office refused to provide records of the task force, American Oversight had to appeal to Cameron’s office, asking it to overturn its own decision.

It declined, responding to American Oversight with an attorney general’s opinion declaring Cameron’s office did not violate the state open records law in refusing to release the records.

Now a court battle over the records is ongoing and the outcome could have a significant impact on which records the attorney general must release when it comes to his own office, Bensenhaver said.

“Is this an important case? You bet,” said Bensenhaver, a lawyer who previously worked as an assistant attorney general in Kentucky for 25 years reviewing open records cases and writing opinions.

“They are establishing a scenario in which they are not accountable,” Bensenhaver said of Cameron’s office.

A Cameron spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

Jon Fleischaker, a Kentucky First Amendment lawyer with decades of experience in open records, said that as attorney general for the past 3 ? years, Cameron has established a poor track record when it comes to upholding public access to government information.

“Anyone who suggests he is a proponent of transparency is just wrong,” said Fleischaker, whose clients include The Courier Journal and the Kentucky Press Association. “He is an opponent of transparency.”

Meanwhile, the dispute continues in Franklin Circuit Court more than a year after Judge Phillip Shepherd ruled Cameron must produce nearly all documents sought by American Oversight, an open records advocacy organization based in Washington D.C.

Its request was part of a broader effort by the group to examine records of similar election task forces around the country, some looking into largely unfounded allegations of fraud and misconduct swirling around the 2020 presidential election in which President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump.

In Kentucky, the “attorney general’s office fought our efforts to shed light on the task force’s activities and priorities,” American Oversight spokesman Jack Patterson said in an email. “It took American Oversight’s lawsuit and a court order to compel the disclosure of public records.”

Documents Cameron eventually released included routine records of scheduling meetings and absentee ballot tracking —“nothing to indicate the task force was anything more than a publicity stunt,” Patterson said.

The dispute continues, with American Oversight arguing Cameron’s office has not searched for and produced all records required under Shepherd’s order.?

Cameron’s office insists it has.

While Cameron’s office did not agree with Shepherd’s ruling, it has elected to comply, it said in a filing in April.

“Although the office maintains it was correct in withholding various records . . . it chose to comply with the court’s opinion and order by providing all records the court ordered it to produce,” Heather Becker, a lawyer for Cameron’s office said in the filing.

Bensenhaver said she can’t figure out why Cameron initially objected to releasing seemingly routine documents sought by American Oversight, such as communications, schedules, agendas and minutes of meetings of the task force set up to review conduct of elections and investigate irregularities.

“I think it’s kind of fascinating that he’s going to erect these barriers to fairly innocuous records,” she said.

Patterson, the American Oversight spokesman, said the records showed that Kentucky’s task force, like others established in other states, ended with the same findings.

“None of these task forces found any evidence of widespread fraud and Kentucky’s Ballot Integrity Task Force was no different,” he said.

American Oversight also requested similar records from Secretary of State Michael Adams, a task force co-chair, who complied with the request, according to court records.

But Cameron’s office has established a pattern of denying requests for its records even while ruling in favor of those seeking information from other state agencies or offices, Bensenhaver said.

Track record ‘untarnished’

In a January post on the Kentucky Open Government site, Bensenhaver noted that Cameron’s office in recent months had ruled against several state officials who denied records requests including the agriculture commissioner and the state treasurer.

“But in at least 12 open records appeals of his office’s handling of requests for public records of his own agency, Attorney General Danial Cameron found no violation of the law,” said Bensenhaver, who sarcastically observed: ?“His track record is virtually untarnished.”

The 12 cases are from 2020 to 2022 and cover topics ranging from a pending prosecution to records sought by the Kentucky Democratic Party of Cameron’s communications with other Republican attorneys general.

Cameron, a Republican, is running against Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, in the 2023 governor’s race.

Bensenhaver noted that in two opinions in January, Cameron found that Beshear’s office had violated open records law by denying in part requests from the Republican Party of Kentucky for records of communications between officials about unemployment claims and school closures during the COVID pandemic.

‘No exceptions’

When American Oversight first requested documents about the task force from Cameron, the attorney general’s office responded by claiming it had identified 14 items but refused to release all but one — a single page of a meeting agenda.

American Oversight then appealed to the attorney general and received the opinion upholding the refusal. In Kentucky, attorney general open records opinions have the force of law unless appealed to circuit court.

So the group filed a lawsuit challenging the opinion, and in July 2022 Shepherd ruled in favor of American Oversight’s right to the records and also directed the attorney general to search for additional records.

“This court is doubtful that a mere 14 records in possession of the (attorney general) are responsive to the plaintiffs open records request,” Shepherd said in the order.

After searching again, Cameron’s office turned over 395 pages of records, American Oversight said in a court filing. Of those, 85 were new and 310 pages were records previously identified but withheld.

The newly-discovered records consisted of calendar invitations, emails and records related to absentee ballots, the filing said.?

Whether any more material remains is the subject of the ongoing dispute.

Shepherd on July 18 ordered American Oversight to question representatives of Cameron’s office in depositions for purposes of “fact finding.”?

The two sides then agreed to ask for additional time to resolve the dispute, which Shepherd granted.

Meanwhile, Shepherd’s ruling of July 2022 establishes two important limits on the attorney general’s power to withhold records, Bensenhaver said.

Cameron’s office, in initially refusing to release all but one page of the task force records, cited two exceptions:?

One, the records withheld might relate to a criminal investigation and therefore were exempt from disclosure; and two, items such as emails about meetings, schedules and agendas were preliminary and therefore exempt.

Shepherd rejected both claims, saying that neither appeared to apply to a public task force created to monitor elections that was announced through a press release.

“The public already knows that the task force exists,” his order said.

According to Shepherd’s order, “no exceptions apply,” Bensenhaver said.

Meanwhile, the task force has conducted little activity in recent months and hasn’t issued any findings about its work, Michon Lindstrom, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state said in an email.

It “typically meets before and sometimes after an election,” Lindstrom said. “But it is a discussion group; it does not take actions or implement policy — so it does not issue reports.”

(Getty Images)

Kentucky will remain with the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, for a year while reviewing possible alternatives to support voter rolls maintenance, Secretary of State Michael Adams said Wednesday.?

Recently, seven Republican-led states have left ERIC, an interstate compact for sharing voter registration data. Some former members like Virginia and Texas plan to create their own data-sharing networks, but a new interstate partnership could be a major challenge, requiring significant time and resources.?

To leave ERIC without a backup plan would be “irresponsible,” Adams said. On the other hand, staying in ERIC would be “equally irresponsible.”

While Kentucky stays in ERIC for the next year, barring it disbands before then, Adams plans to look at alternatives, consider possible statutory changes and confer with other secretaries of state.?

“I will work in good faith with officials in both political parties, here in Kentucky and federally, and if I remain in Office for the 2024 General Assembly, I will work with legislators of both political parties to develop other ways to continue the progress we have made in cleaning up our rolls,” Adams said.?

Adams, a Republican, is seeking a second term in office. He said in his tenure, approximately 330,000 voters have been purged from voter rolls with assistance from Kentucky’s ERIC membership. Through the system, the state has received information about voters who moved out of state and re-registered elsewhere or voters who died after moving out-of-state.?

Because nearly a quarter of ERIC’s members have left or are planning to leave, annual dues will increase, Adams said. Another issue for Kentucky is that only one neighboring state is left in the compact, and interstate relocation to and from Kentucky typically involves its neighbors, “Kentucky is about to pay a lot more money to get a lot less information.”?

A recent court filing by Adams said Kentucky’s dues this year are $40,039 and are projected to increase to $58,797, or, if Texas leaves as expected, $65,115.?

Adams said he asked the judge who presided over Judicial Watch’s 2017 lawsuit against former Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes if Kentucky is obligated to remain in ERIC. The federal judge ordered Grimes to clean up voter rolls in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.?

Part of the settlement included Kentucky stepping up compliance efforts, which included joining ERIC in 2019, Adams said.?

Adams said he will not remove Kentucky from ERIC if the court does not allow it. If the departure is permitted, Kentucky will need time to review alternatives to getting necessary voter information for maintaining roles, the cost of alternatives and if legislative action is needed.?

The U.S. Department of Justice, which intervened in the Judicial Watch case, has offered assistance in reviewing alternatives, Adams continued. He also said “receipt of information from federal agencies like the U.S. Postal Service and the Social Security Administration would greatly help.”

“Prior to last year, ERIC was not controversial,” Adams said. “Unfortunately, like any effort at bipartisanship in recent history, it has come under attack. I have consistently defended ERIC against falsehoods about its funding and operations, even risking my re-nomination for this Office to do so. ERIC has helped Kentucky comply with the law and conduct fair elections. While my administration will never cave to conspiracy theorists, it nevertheless is true that the value of ERIC to us going forward is a debatable question.”

The boundaries of Kentucky's six congressional districts, redrawn in 2022, are being challenged before the Kentucky Supreme Court, which will hear arguments in the case Sept. 19. Of special interest is what political scientist Stephen Voss calls the "Comer hook," extending the 1st Congressional District from the Mississippi River to Frankfort. (Kentucky Legislative Research Commission)

A fight over Kentucky’s state House and U.S. congressional districts is now before the state Supreme Court, more than a year after new maps were adopted by the Republican supermajority that controls the General Assembly.

On March 23, the high court agreed to take the challenge by state Democrats, bypassing the state Appeals Court, “in the interests of judicial economy.”

Now it’s up to the Supreme Court to decide whether the maps established through redistricting — which a lower court judge already found to be gerrymandered, or manipulated to favor one party — also are unconstitutional.

“This is purely a legal question, not a factual one on whether the maps are unfair,” said Joshua Douglas,? a University of Kentucky law professor who studies election and constitutional law.

The Supreme Court has scheduled a hearing in the dispute on Sept. 19.

Districts, which define the area an elected official represents, are adjusted every 10 years by the legislature to reflect changes in population and generally favor the party in power.

The legal fight comes in advance of next year’s primary and general elections in which all 100 House races and Kentucky’s six congressional seats could be contested.

Two days after the Nov. 8, 2022 general election, Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate ruled that the state House and congressional districts enacted earlier that year resulted from “partisan gerrymanders” but he declined to find them unconstitutional.

The case wound up before the Supreme Court after Kentucky Democrats appealed the decision.

They argued the Republican maps split up many more counties in House districts than allowed by the state constitution.

Democrats also objected to the 1st Congressional District based in Western Kentucky, reconfigured to include Franklin County — an alleged move to dilute its Democratic votes and accommodate incumbent U.S. Rep. James Comer, a Republican who hails from Tompkinsville in Monroe County but owns a home in Frankfort.

Republicans have scoffed at the challenge, with a spokesman for the state GOP previously calling it a “frivolous lawsuit.”

A spokesman for the Republican Party of Kentucky recently called the legal challenge a “desperate move by Andy Beshear and the Democrats to manipulate the political process,” adding that Democrats in past years have controlled the redistricting process, yet “Republicans achieved supermajorities on maps drawn by the Democrats.”

Democrats called on the Supreme Court to reject maps that resulted from Republicans working “behind closed doors to draw districts that cut up communities for partisan gain,” Anna Breedlove, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Party of Kentucky, said in a statement.

“If this isn’t stopped now, Republicans will only grow bolder in their partisan gerrymandering in coming decades allowing Frankfort politicians to decide who they represent, picking easier paths to power and reelection, rather than allowing Kentuckians to decide who represents them,” her statement said.

Douglas said he believes Democrats stand a chance, based on Wingate’s finding that both the House and congressional districts are gerrymandered.

“I think there’s a decent chance of success for the plaintiffs,” said Douglas, who is considering filing a brief in the case urging the court to “robustly construe the state constitution to protect against extreme partisan gerrymandering.”

D. Stephen Voss, an associate professor of political science at UK, declined to speculate on the possible outcome of the case. But he said Republicans may find it difficult to defend what he called the “Comer hook,” in which the 1st Congressional District was stretched to reach into Franklin County, presumably to benefit the incumbent.

The reconfiguration makes no sense and doesn’t comport with the accepted standard that congressional districts are supposed to be compact, Voss said.

“Almost any realistic solution has Jamie Comer losing Franklin County,” he said.

Voss said one theory about adding Franklin County, which tends to vote Democratic, to Comer’s district is that it was to remove it from Republican Rep. Andy Barr’s 6th District to protect him in future elections.

But if that were the goal, Voss said, it would have made more sense to add Franklin County to Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s 4th District which includes Northern Kentucky.

That makes more sense geographically than the Comer “hook,” he said. “That was just a liability for the Republicans,” Voss said. “It gave them congressional districts that were hard to defend.”

Still, there’s no guarantee another version of the district maps, especially for the state House seats, will help Democrats in a state so heavily dominated by the GOP, Voss said.

Should the Supreme Court throw out the current maps and order the General Assembly to start over, “they can come back with a map that is no better for the Democrats,” Voss said.

“Indeed, they could come back with a map that’s worse,” said Voss, who testified as an expert witness at the trial last year on behalf of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican defending the redistricting plans.

And it’s uncertain whether the Supreme Court will rule before the Jan. 5 filing deadline for candidates who wish to run in the May 2024 primary election.

A change to the maps could affect the decision of candidates about the district in which to seek office.

A decision sooner than later is better for Democrats when it comes to planning campaigns, Voss said.

“If Democrats are going to have any hope of clawing back territory, the earlier they know what the districts are going to be, the better,” Voss said. “The longer this takes, the more likely Democrats are going to suffer what they suffered last time.”

Last year, Democrats faulted the new districts for their loss of several House seats in the November election, increasing the Republicans’ supermajority to 80 out of 100 representatives.?

And the 2024 election features a number of races that could be affected by any changes to districts with all 100 House and Kentucky’s six congressional seats up for election.

The presidential race also on the 2024 ballot will heighten interest among voters, said Michon Lindstrom, communications director for the Kentucky Secretary of State.

“In presidential years, we have the best turnout,” Lindstrom said. “There will be a lot of interest next year.”

Douglas, the law professor, said he believes the case could be decided before the January filing deadline as well as in time for the legislature to act on new maps when it convenes in 2024, if necessary.

“I do think there’s time for the court to rule and, if it strikes down the maps, for the legislature to redraw the maps — even next January,” he said. “It passed the current maps in a matter of days.”

Wingate ruled in favor of Republicans after deciding that the House and congressional districts, though gerrymandered, were not necessarily unconstitutional.

“The Kentucky Constitution does not explicitly prohibit the General Assembly from making partisan considerations during the apportionment process,” Wingate’s order said.

He added: “The court understands that partisan gerrymandering challenges have been sweeping the nation and that plaintiffs want this court to look at and rely upon decisions made by other states’ high courts, but this court is only concerned with the Kentucky Constitution and what is permitted under it.”

This story has been updated with a statement from Republican Party of Kentucky spokesman Sean Southard.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down Alabama's congressional maps is expected to provide a boost to other lawsuits alleging racial gerrymandering. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)

A voter and his children walk into a polling location on May 16, 2023, at the Scott County Public Library in Georgetown. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

Should Kentucky leave too? Adams says exodus of states is making ERIC less useful.?

FRANKFORT — Count Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams among the defenders of ERIC against baseless conspiratorial claims.

The database has helped Kentucky remove 320,00 ineligible voters, about half of them dead, since Adams took office more than three years ago.

But as states leave the interstate compact, Adams says, membership is becoming less useful and also more costly to Kentucky. It’s possible the “multitude of resignations over the last few months” will cause ERIC (an acronym for Electronic Registration Information Center) to dissolve.

These concerns are raised by Adams in a filing with the federal judge who in 2018 ordered Kentucky and then-Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, to clean up voter rolls in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.?

U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove ruled that due to underfunding the state was falling behind in purging ineligible voters. The judge ordered the state Board of Elections to submit a plan for improving voter registration maintenance.???

The order further specified that Kentucky should regularly use five sources of information, one of them ERIC, to identify voters who may have moved without notifying election officials.

Kentucky joined ERIC the next year.?

Now Adams is asking the judge to clarify whether his order, known as a consent decree, “requires utilization of ERIC — regardless of cost, and value — if other resources may be used effectively to identify and ultimately remove voters who should come off our rolls.”

That’s a big “if,” as the accompanying article explains.

Adams is researching alternative sources of information now provided by ERIC and discussing with election officials in other states “bilateral measures” they might take in lieu of ERIC, according to the motion for clarification.

?“While Secretary Adams has previously defended the ERIC organization and process from misinformation and conspiracy theories, political developments outside our state and outside his control draw into question the continued usefulness of ERIC to Kentucky,” says the motion.

As states leave, membership dues increase. Kentucky’s dues this year are $40,039, the filing says, projected to increase to $58,797 or, if Texas leaves as expected, $65,115.?

“ERIC, at its essence, is a great resource,” a lawyer for Adams wrote. “The more states that belong, the more effective it is for the member states to identify their voters who have moved and no longer vote in their states.”?

However, none of the states where Kentuckians most move or relocate from belong to ERIC, having just resigned or never joined, according to Adams’ motion.

The filing identifies the states where Kentuckians move most as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, Texas with the most relocations to Kentucky coming from Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia.

So far this year, seven states, all Republican-led, have left the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate compact for sharing voter registration data, and more could follow.

Amid the exodus, some states, including Texas and Virginia, have said they plan to create their own data-sharing networks to replace ERIC.

Pledging to build a new system gives these states a way to rebut charges that leaving ERIC will make it harder for them to keep their voter rolls up to date. ERIC provides its members with what they say is invaluable and highly accurate data on voters who have moved or died.

But a close look at how ERIC was set up and how it operates suggests that building any new interstate partnership from scratch will be a major challenge, at the very least requiring significant time and resources.

Underscoring the point are previous failed efforts by states to create similar pacts: Two appear to have barely gotten off the ground, and one ultimately collapsed under the weight of its faulty data and lax security measures.

“It is possible, but very, very difficult,” said David Becker, the election administration expert who had a leading role in founding ERIC over a decade ago and now runs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“A group of states could come together, and, after several years and millions of dollars of investment, create something that is almost as good as ERIC. And you’d have to wonder, why would you do that?”

More likely, it appears, is that the states quitting ERIC are simply leaving themselves without an effective system for sharing information, leading to less accurate and up-to-date voter rolls.

That will not only make it harder for election administrators to catch the rare cases of illegal voting. It also will hugely complicate their efforts to ensure smooth and well-run elections across the board — at a time when Americans’ trust in voting systems is already dangerously low.

Virginia exits

On May 11, Virginia became the most recent state to leave ERIC, echoing the same false charges of political bias spread by right-wing activists that led the other states — Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, Iowa, Missouri, and Alabama — to depart earlier this year (Louisiana left last year). Some of these states also balked at ERIC’s mandate that they reach out to eligible voters and encourage them to register.

But Virginia officials emphasized that they were not giving up on the idea of an interstate data-sharing compact. Getting voter registration information from other states can allow election officials to identify voters who may have moved out of state, and, after fully verifying their identities, remove them from the rolls.

“We will pursue other information arrangements with our neighboring states and look to other opportunities to partner with states in an apolitical fashion,” Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals wrote in a letter informing ERIC of the state’s decision.

Asked about the effort, the Virginia Department of Elections responded with a statement: “Virginia has been participating in talks with other states for several months about creating new state-to-state data-sharing relationships for the purpose of identifying potential double voters.”

A spokesperson declined to answer a list of detailed questions about how the program might work.

Texas is working on similar plans. The state is required by law to participate in a data-sharing program with other states, and it’s currently still an ERIC member.

But in March, the secretary of state’s office announced it was shifting its long-time elections director into a new post to create an alternative inter-state system. And a bill to withdraw from ERIC and have the state build its own new system, or contract with a private-sector firm for $100,000 or less, received final approval from Texas lawmakers last week.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of the bill, said in early May that the new system could be in place by Sept. 1, when his measure would go into effect if passed.

“We are actively researching options for a crosscheck system right now,” Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office said via email.

Pierce declined to answer a list of detailed questions about how the program might work.

A spokesman for Hughes did not respond to a request for comment on the program.

But given the enormous data and security challenges that went into the creation of ERIC — which was conceived in 2009 but wasn’t up and running until three years later —? it appears doubtful that building a system that provides states with comparably useful voter information can be done on anything close to Hughes’ timeline and as cheaply as the measure requires, if it can be done at all.

First, experts say, any useful data-sharing system needs to include records from state motor vehicle departments, because that data includes identifiers that don’t typically appear on voter-registration records, including a person’s full birthdate, their driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, and more.

Without that level of detail, attempts to match records will produce an extremely high rate of false positives, because lots of people have the same first name, last name, and birthday. (Sen. Rick Scott of Florida was purged from the rolls in 2006 after election administrators wrongly concluded he had died, thanks to exactly this error.)

But, because of privacy concerns, states protect motor vehicles department data very closely. ERIC only was able to get access to it after establishing an extensive set of cybersecurity protocols that experts say would be difficult to replicate, including double one-way hashing — essentially, a code to disguise sensitive data in case of a hack — and secure, dedicated domestic servers.

Then, there’s the problem of how to use the data.

With so many different identifiers, finding a potential match involves comparing multiple records, then conducting a sophisticated statistical analysis to determine the probability that the records actually belong to the same person.

ERIC’s system was developed by Jeff Jonas, one of the world’s leading data scientists, and a former IBM Fellow — a title the company calls its “pre-eminent technical distinction,” given to “the best and brightest of our best and brightest.”

Finally, there’s the need to attract red, blue, and purple states as members. Any system that only has one will be far less effective, because the number of states with which it can share data will be limited.

With this in mind, ERIC’s founders consciously included rules to appeal to both sides.

For red states concerned about election integrity, ERIC provided data that could help officials pare their rolls of ineligible voters. And for blue states concerned about expanding access, ERIC offered something else: A way to identify a state’s pool of eligible but unregistered voters, and a requirement that the state contact these potential voters and urge them to register. (This was the requirement that played a role in the recent departures of several red states — suggesting that the balance that ERIC sought to strike may be hard to maintain in an era when some red-state officials openly disdain efforts to expand access.)

In addition, ERIC’s board and executive committee are always bipartisan, and its chair alternates each year between election directors from a red state and a blue state.

The bottom line: Replicating what ERIC built would be a major technical, scientific, administrative and political challenge, even for a state committed to making it work.

“It’s really hard to stand up (a new system) on your own,” said Becker. “Because, one, you probably can’t get the data you need, and two, you’re probably not going to be able to afford to take the time to build the governance structure and technology that you need to make use of that data.”

A cautionary tale

An example already exists of what’s likely to happen if organizers of an interstate data-sharing system are unable or unwilling to invest the time and care needed to make it work effectively.

In 2005, Kansas election officials, working with their counterparts in Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri, created the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck, often called Crosscheck, to help identify voters who were registered in multiple states.

When Kris Kobach became Kansas secretary of state in 2011, he expanded the program, and by 2014 it had 29 members.

But Crosscheck’s approach was badly flawed. The program didn’t require motor vehicles department data, and it flagged voter registrations as potential duplicates if the first name, last name, and birthdate all matched, inevitably producing huge numbers of false positives. States then had to wade through reams of Crosscheck data to weed these out.

“Crosscheck data is prone to false positives since the initial matching is only conducted using first name, last name, and date of birth,” Virginia election administrators reported in 2015. “The need to greatly refine and analyze Crosscheck data has required significant (elections) staff resources.”

In some cases, states failed to identify false positives sent by Crosscheck, and removed large numbers of eligible voters from the rolls.

There were also reports that raised questions about Crosscheck’s handling of private voter data. A 2018 lawsuit filed by the ACLU charged that Crosscheck’s lax security measures had violated voters’ right to privacy. As part of a settlement the following year, the program was shuttered. It hasn’t been in operation since.

More failed efforts

With Crosscheck offline, some of its members began exploring other ways to share data.

In 2020, Indiana passed a bill that allowed the state to formally withdraw from Crosscheck. But because state officials were reluctant to join ERIC — already Republicans had begun to falsely suggest the group was biased against them — the measure called for the creation of the Indiana Data Enhancement Association, or IDEA, a new system in which Indiana would partner with its neighbors to share data.

IDEA never got off the ground. All four of Indiana’s neighbors — Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan — were at the time ERIC members (Ohio was among the states that left this year), making it unlikely that they would have been interested in joining a new compact.

There are also signs that the bill’s drafters lacked expertise in data-matching. IDEA treats it as partial evidence that a voter is registered in multiple states if their driver’s license number or address matches with another state’s records. But experts say another state’s data would never include Indiana driver’s license numbers, which are closely protected, or Indiana addresses.

In August 2020, a federal judge ruled that Indiana’s procedure for removing voters from the rolls violated federal voting law by failing to give voters sufficient notice before removal. Since IDEA would have used the same procedure, the ruling, which was upheld on appeal the following year, effectively blocked the program from moving forward.

“We would have no problem with the state setting up something that followed federal law and somehow getting a bunch of other states to go along with it,” said Julia Vaughn, the executive director of Common Cause Indiana, which brought the lawsuit against the state. “But good luck doing that with one individual state with no real expertise in this, and no reputation as some entity that other states should trust their voter registration lists with.”

Asked about the short-lived effort, Lindsey Eaton, a spokesperson for the Indiana secretary of state’s office, didn’t respond directly.

“IDEA never launched in Indiana,” Eaton said via email.

The author of the bill that created IDEA, Sen. Greg Walker, did not respond to an inquiry about efforts to launch the program. His staff said he was on vacation.

New Hampshire election officials confronted the same issue with Crosscheck’s demise. A large share of the Granite State’s population has relocated from neighboring states, making an interstate system especially useful there.

Again, there was reluctance to join ERIC, despite a push for it from some lawmakers. At a 2019 hearing, Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan, today the secretary of state, raised the idea of New Hampshire instead creating its own program to collaborate with other states.

Scanlan’s boss at the time, then-Secretary of State Bill Gardner, suggested New Hampshire could team up with Massachusetts and Maine to find voters who are double registered.

“We could get states to come together,” Gardner said. “It appears it’s the only option.”

That never panned out. Maine joined ERIC in 2021, and Massachusetts followed last year.

Asked whether New Hampshire ever tried to create a new system, Anna Sventek, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, did not respond directly.

“Nothing is in the works,” Sventek said via email, adding that the state would still be interested in joining such a system “should the opportunity arise.”

Whitney Downard contributed to this report.

A resident casts his vote on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, at Morton Middle School in Lexington. Photo by Abbey Cutrer | Kentucky Lantern

LEXINGTON — Inside St. Luke United Methodist Church, David Osborne’s second year working as a poll worker is a quiet one, and quite different from his last election.

“In the general election in the fall, we had about 80 people in line when the doors opened at (6 a.m.) This year we had one,” Osborne said.

There were no lines and not many voters either at a sampling of polling sites that Kentucky Lantern staff visited during Tuesday’s primary elections.

Kentucky voters are deciding who will represent Republicans and Democrats in races for statewide offices this fall including state attorney general, state treasurer, state auditor, secretary of state and agriculture commissioner. The biggest race features 12 candidates in a crowded GOP gubernatorial primary vying to take on the Democratic winner, widely expected to be incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.

Kentucky’s chief election official already expected lower turnout in this primary election, predicting around 10% of the state’s 3,468,537 registered voters would show up. That’s much lower than the turnout of about 19% in the 2019 primaries when the last party nominations for statewide offices were held. Tuesday’s rain could hamper turnout even more.

In Jefferson County, which has the largest share of GOP registered voters among counties and home to Louisville, the county clerk’s office reported an 11% overall turnout so far with 73,085 votes cast as of about 5 p.m. ET.

For the voters who have made it to the polls, many expressed a desire to support their preferred candidates and in general exercise their right to vote.

Emily Blevins, 21, a senior at Eastern Kentucky University who is from Stamping Ground, said she voted for Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Voting in the Scott County seat of Georgetown , she had met Quarles a few times and knew he was from the county.

“He was super kind and willing to talk to me about anything, and especially with my school studies and stuff. He’s just really personable,” Blevins said. “I am in school, so they’re very adamant about voting … that makes me feel proud.”

Quarles has consistently been polling in third place behind the two other leading candidates in the GOP primary for governor, former U.N. Ambassador Kelly Craft and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Cindy Maloy of Georgetown said she cast a ballot for Cameron, and voted because she wanted “to be able to say I’ve had a say so in who was elected, who’s going to do what.”

As for why she voted for Cameron, the 50-year-old, said: “I like how he is not afraid to be himself and that he has the best interest, I feel like, financially and socially.”

South of Lexington in Jessamine County, at least one Republican voter thought Beshear, one of the more popular governors in the country according to some polling, would ultimately be hard to beat.

“I’m a strong Republican. We don’t have anybody that can beat Beshear this election, I don’t think,” said 88-year-old Patrick Caskey, a veteran living in Nicholasville. “A lot of good things have happened in this country and this state under his watch, but so much of it started before he ever came to be governor.”

Caskey almost voted for Cameron but instead voted for Craft because of worries about if Cameron could beat Beshear.

“I like what she says that she will do in Kentucky: ‘If I’m governor, and we catch a drug dealer, he’s going to prison,’” he said.

Caskey put his act of voting in the larger perspective of freedoms he sees are afforded in the United States.

“It’s terribly important that we always vote,” Caskey said. “This is an honor and a privilege to do what we do in this country, and for the mess our country is in today, we’re still terribly blessed with the freedom we have.”

The Kentucky Senate on Tuesday approved a bill ending one form of voter identification. (Getty Images)

The primary election in Kentucky is Tuesday, May 16. Statewide, voters will choose party nominees for the general election.?

On Tuesday polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time. Kentucky is split between Eastern and Central Daylight time zones.?

Most voters’ ballots will only have elections for constitutional officers: governor,?attorney general, secretary of state, agriculture commissioner, treasurer and auditor.?

No one has officially filed for the office of lieutenant governor as Kentucky gubernatorial candidates must select a running mate to join their ticket. Those selections must be made by the second Tuesday in August.?

A state Senate seat will be decided by voters in Bath, Clark, Menifee, Montgomery and part of Fayette counties. The special election, which has three candidates, will fill an unexpired term in District 28. The seat became open after Dr. Ralph Alvarado, a Republican, became Tennessee’s health commissioner.?

Any voter who is in line by 6 p.m. will be allowed to cast a ballot. Kentucky does not have same-day registration. But if you registered to vote 29 days before the election and your name is not on the precinct roster, you may request a provisional ballot.

Proof of identification is required to vote in Kentucky. Accepted forms are a drivers license, college ID, military ID or another ID issued by the state or a county or city that has the voter’s name and photograph. More details about voters’ rights can be found on the State Board of Elections website.

Mail-in absentee ballots must be received by the local county clerk before 6 p.m. on Election Day.?

Voters may report suspected election law violations and voting irregularities to the Attorney General’s Office via its Election Fraud Hotline. The hotline will be staffed on Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The number is 1-800-328-VOTE, or 1-800-328-8683.?The number of complaints logged by the hotline will be posted on the office’s website.?

For details about your local polling place, including an address, visit the State Board of Elections website and select your county. More information can be found at govote.ky.gov.?

Live election results will be available online from the State Board of Elections.?

To view a sample ballot, visit the Secretary of State’s website.

The efforts come at a time when the youth vote has been surging. (Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)

A top Republican election lawyer recently caused a stir when she told GOP donors that the party should work to make it harder for college students to vote in key states.

But the comments from Cleta Mitchell, who worked closely with then-President Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election, are perhaps less surprising than they seem.?

They follow numerous efforts in recent years by Republican lawmakers across the country to restrict voting by college students, a group that leans Democratic. And they come at a time when the youth vote has been surging.

At an April 15 retreat for donors to the Republican National Committee, Mitchell, a leader in the broader conservative push to impose new voting restrictions, called on her party to find ways to tighten the rules for student voting in several battleground states.

Mitchell’s comments were first posted online by the independent progressive journalist Lauren Windsor.

With Republicans now enjoying veto-proof majorities in both of North Carolina’s chambers, Mitchell said, the party has a chance to crack down on voting by students there.?

“We need to be looking at, what are these college campus locations and polling, what is this young people effort that [Democrats] do?” said Mitchell. “They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm, so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”?

“And we need to build strong election integrity task forces in those counties,” Mitchell added, naming Durham, Wake, and Mecklenburg counties — all of which are Democratic strongholds and are home to large colleges.

Wisconsin ‘is a big problem’

The Election Integrity Network, which Mitchell chairs, works to build what it calls Election Integrity Task Forces, in which volunteers aim to root out fraud and illegal voting.

Mitchell also lamented that in Wisconsin and Michigan, both of which offer same-day voter registration, polling sites are located on campuses, making it easy for students to register and vote in one trip.?

“So they’ve registered them in one line, and then they vote them in the second line,” Mitchell said.

“Wisconsin is a big problem, because of the polling locations on college campuses,” Mitchell continued. “Their goal for the Supreme Court race was to turn out 240,000 college students in that Supreme Court race. And we don’t have anything like that, and we need to figure out how to do that, and how to combat that.”

The recent race for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, which was won by the liberal candidate backed by Democrats, saw record campus turnout.

Mitchell also brought up New Hampshire, which has a higher share of college students than any other state, as well as statewide elections that are often decided by just a few thousand votes, The Granite State has seen a series of efforts in recent years to impose stricter rules for student voting, despite no evidence of illegal voting by students.?

“I just talked to Governor Sununu, and asked him about the college student voting issue that has been a problem,” Mitchell said, referring to the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu.?

“He thinks it’s fixed. We just need to have an active task force to make sure it’s fixed, and do our look back about whether or not they did go back and make sure those college students who presented, who said they were residents, really were.”

Finally, Mitchell falsely claimed that, thanks to President Joe Biden, people who apply for federal student loan aid are required to fill out a voter registration form.?

A White House executive order does urge federal agencies, including the Department of Education, to offer voter registration opportunities. But no one is required to register.

Banning student IDs for voting

Mitchell’s remarks weren’t focused only on student voting.?

She also declared that if Republicans win full control of Virginia state government this year, they should eliminate early voting and same-day registration in the state. And she said that any group “that’s got democracy in their name — those are not friends of ours.”

But the comments about voting by college students deserve particular scrutiny because of an ongoing multi-state push to tighten the rules for student voters — including by banning student IDs for voting.?

Mike Burns, the national director for the Campus Vote Project, which works as an arm of the nonpartisan Fair Elections Center to expand access to voting for college students, said the tens of millions of students enrolled in higher education across the country already face a unique set of hurdles in casting a ballot: They’re less likely than other voters to have a driver’s license or utility bill to use as ID; they’re less likely to have a car to get to an off-campus polling site; and they often move each year, requiring them to go through the registration process anew each time.

Few states, Burns added, design their election systems to address these challenges. Despite Mitchell’s fear about students rolling out of bed to vote, a 2022 Duke University study that looked at 35 states found that nearly three quarters of colleges did not have voting sites on campus.

Given this backdrop, “it’s just that much more exasperating,” Burns said, “to hear someone talk about intentionally trying to make that even harder, and to do it for political reasons.”?

Surging youth vote

The issue of student voting has flared lately thanks to a recent surge in the youth vote. The midterm elections of 2018 and 2022 saw the two highest turnout rates for voters under 30 in the last three decades. And in 2020, half of all eligible voters under 30 turned out, a stunning 11-point increase from 2016.?

In 2018, those voters went for Democratic candidates by a 49-point margin, and in 2020 they went for Biden over Trump by 24 points — making them easily the most Democratic-leaning age group in both years.

That’s spurred Republican legislators to take action. This year alone, three GOP-controlled states — Missouri, Montana, and Idaho — have tightened their voter ID laws to remove student IDs from the list of documents voters can use to prove their identity.?

Montana’s law was struck down as a violation of the state constitution. Idaho’s is being challenged in court by voting rights groups.

One of the Idaho bill’s backers, state Rep. Tina Lambert, said she was concerned that students from neighboring Oregon or Washington might use their student IDs to vote in Idaho, then also vote in their home state. In fact, there has not been a single instance of fraud linked to student IDs in the state.

Idaho saw a 66% increase in registration by 18- and 19-year-olds between November 2018 and September 2022, by far the highest in the country, a Tufts University study found.?

A fourth state, Ohio, passed a strict voter ID law with a similar impact. Ohio doesn’t allow student IDs for voting, but previously it did allow utility bills. So colleges would issue students zero-dollar utility bills to be used for voter ID purposes. The new law, which is also being challenged in court, eliminates that option by requiring a photo ID.

In Texas, where growing numbers of young and non-white voters threaten to upend the state’s politics, one Republican bill introduced this session would ban polling places on college campuses. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Carrie Isaac, has described it as a safety measure aimed at keeping outsiders off campus, since campus polling places also serve the wider voting public.

Voter advocates charged in a lawsuit that a 2021 Texas law establishing strict residency requirements would particularly burden college students, by preventing them from registering at their prior home address when they temporarily move away for college. A federal judge last year struck down much of the law, but the decision was reversed on appeal.

‘They just vote their feelings’

Efforts to make it difficult for students and other young people to vote are almost as old as the 26th Amendment, which went into effect in 1971, enfranchising Americans aged 18 to 20.?

In one Texas county with a large, historically Black university, the chief voting official responded to the measure by requiring students to answer questions about their employment status and property ownership, before being stopped by a federal court in a key ruling for student voting rights.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision weakening the Voting Rights Act, Texas imposed a voter ID law that didn’t allow student IDs, even those from state universities, though it did include handgun licenses. And North Carolina passed a sweeping 2013 voting law that, among other steps, ended pre-registration of high-school students.?

Two years earlier, Wisconsin passed a voter ID law that does allow student IDs from state universities, but mandates that the ID have an expiration date and have been issued within the last two years — requirements that many student IDs don’t meet. Though some colleges have created special voter IDs, advocates say the issue still generates significant confusion among students.

New Hampshire has often been a hotspot for efforts to restrict student voting. Backers of these efforts have at times argued that students don’t have as much stake in the community as other voters, since they might not stick around after college.

A 2021 bill that died in committee would have barred students from using their campus address to register. “People who go to college in New Hampshire, unless they are really bona fide permanent residents … should vote by absentee ballot in their home states,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Norman Silver, told Stateline. “It’s a matter of simple equity.”

Back in 2011, Rep. William O’Brien, then the House speaker and advocating for a bill to tighten residency requirements, was even blunter.?

“They go into these general elections, they’ll have 900 same-day registrations, which are the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal,” O’Brien said. “That’s what kids do. They don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the towns’ ability to govern themselves. It’s not fair.”

Burns, of the Campus Vote Project, said that kind of sentiment not only runs counter not only to the purpose of the 26th Amendment, but to any notion of voting as a civic good.?

This is a formative process,” said Burns. “We know from research that if people start to vote at a younger age, they will stay involved. It puts them on a trajectory of being more involved in civic life for the rest of their life, and I think that’s a good thing.”

“Every community is better when more people have their voices heard. And that includes young people,” Burns added. “So regardless of who someone’s going to vote for, we think they should have equal access.”

From left to right: Luis Marquez, Manuel Castro and Guillermina Fuentes after Fuentes was released from jail. (Photo by Luis Marquez)

This story was produced in partnership with?Type Investigations, with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government.?

SAN LUIS, ARIZ. – The small city of San Luis is tucked away in the far corner of Arizona, closer to Mexico than to any major U.S. city. The community is nearly 95% Latino and tight-knit — the type of place where you know your neighbors and their parents and cousins.

It’s not uncommon here for residents to frequently cross the border into Mexico to go shopping or see a dentist, as the vast majority of residents are U.S. citizens who can go back and forth freely. And they do not take their right to vote in the U.S. for granted. Election Days in San Luis were typically joyous occasions, with music and celebrations in the streets.

Luis Marquez, the president of the local school district and a community leader in San Luis, said they felt “like a state fair.”

“Everybody would get involved, people would have their carne asada and music and it was just something very active,” he said.

But election celebrations have stopped here in recent years. A 2016?law?pushed by state Republicans made it a felony punishable by prison time to collect a voter’s ballot unless the collector is their? relative, household member, or caregiver. Since then, the excitement and joy surrounding voting have been replaced with fear. “Now, it’s been really quiet,” Marquez said. “There’s no action.”

In some states, there’s no prohibition on collecting ballots from other community members, a common occurrence in places where residents have limited access to polls. But Arizona is one of more than?30 states?that restrict or ban the practice.

The law was signed in 2016 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 after it was challenged in the lower courts. Since then, the Arizona attorney general’s office has prosecuted four community members, including the city’s former mayor, Guillermina Fuentes, who was jailed for 30 days, for alleged unlawful ballot collection.

Allies of former President Donald Trump say these arrests are indicative of the type of voter fraud that cost him the 2020 election. But democracy advocates say prosecuting these cases suppresses the right to vote.

“This is what opponents of the ballot collection law always feared – the arbitrary enforcement of the law against people of color, women of color, without any kind of evidence of any type of fraud or intent to do wrongdoing,” said Darrell Hill, policy director for the ACLU of Arizona. “These are people who are just helping their neighbors, helping their community, and are now facing serious charges.”

On Oct. 13, Fuentes, a 66-year-old grandmother, former farmworker, school board member, and local Democratic leader, was sentenced to one month in jail and two years of probation for collecting four completed mail ballots that belonged to community members during the August 2020 primary. Fuentes and her neighbor, Alma Juarez, were the first people prosecuted under the state’s ballot collection law.

Her prosecution by the office of former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who was running for U.S. Senate throughout much of the legal proceeding, became fodder for conspiracy theorists and the right-wing elections group True The Vote, which publicized the case nationally.

In an interview after she was released from jail, Fuentes described the initial shock of her indictment. At the time of her offense, Brnovich’s office had petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a case focused on the law, and there were legal questions about whether it was constitutional.

“When I was about to go to jail, I was so sad and frustrated, and I couldn’t believe that I was going, because I see it like a witch hunt,” she said. Brnovich, who is no longer in office, could not be reached for comment and Todd Lawson, the prosecutor with the attorney general’s office who worked on the case, did not respond to a request for comment.

On Oct. 19, Brnovich announced?two more indictments?against women in the Democratic-leaning town within a county that voted for Trump by 6 points in 2020. The attorney general’s office alleges that the women collected eight ballots between them.

Fuentes’ daughter, Lizette Esparza, said she wakes up each morning in fear of how conspiracy theorists will talk about her family on social media.

“We’re living in a nightmare right now,” said Esparza, who serves as the superintendent of the local elementary school district. She also worries about how her mom’s ordeal will affect the community. “They’re not going to want to go to vote, especially now because now they’re scared.”

Casting ballots in San Luis

Like a town square, the San Luis post office is a major hub of this border community. During business hours, cars steadily stream through the parking lot as residents, on their way to or from work or school pick-up, run inside to check their P.O. boxes.

San Luis doesn’t have home mail delivery. The city spans roughly 34 square miles, and it’s not uncommon for people to pick up mail for friends and neighbors, who may share P.O. boxes. The community is poor, with an average per capita income of just over $15,000. Many residents don’t have their own vehicles and there’s very limited public transportation.

Casting a ballot in-person can be difficult for people in San Luis. Like Fuentes, who dropped out of high school after 10th grade to join her parents and siblings planting and harvesting lettuce crops in Arizona and California, many San Luis residents are farmworkers who speak little English and spend long hours in the fields.

“They leave at 5 in the morning and come back at 7 or 8 at night,” Esparza explained. “When in the day are they going to have to go and vote?”

Arizona has permitted no-excuse voting by mail for more than 30 years. And before the ballot collection law was passed, it was not uncommon for residents of San Luis to rely on friends, neighbors, or volunteers to help bring their ballots to the post office or to help return them to a voting center or dropbox.

San Luis residents interviewed explained that they consider many in the community who are not blood relatives, like neighbors and close friends, their family. Limiting ballot collection to just family members, household members, and caregivers doesn’t make sense, they said.

“People who enacted this law are people who don’t want people in San Luis and Native communities to vote,” said Anne Chapman, Fuentes’ attorney. “That’s what this is about.”

GOP restrictions on voting

The Republican Party’s effort to restrict certain groups of people from voting has taken many forms over the last decade since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

One of them is placing limits on ballot collection, or as Republican lawmakers pejoratively call it, “ballot harvesting.” Republican officials justify the laws by claiming that an individual or organization could pressure a voter to vote in a certain way if they return a ballot on their behalf.

“The intent behind the bill is to make sure that we have integrity in our electoral process, that there is a chain of custody when it comes to mail-in ballots,”?said?then-state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored Arizona’s law when she was a state representative. Ballot collection, she said, “is ripe for a lot of things to go wrong.”

Arizona’s law, passed by the legislature in 2016, faced a lengthy legal challenge. Democratic groups sued, and in 2018, a federal district court sided with Arizona after a trial. But Democrats appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck the law down, finding that it violates the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minority voters.

Republican lawmakers, the court found, passed it with the intention of suppressing the votes of Native American, Hispanic and Black voters, who often face issues with mail service and access to transportation and who are more likely to rely on the assistance of third parties to return their ballots.

Brnovich appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the law in a 6-3 ruling in July 2021 that?had major implications for voting rights across the country. In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan lamented how the majority opinion further weakens the Voting Rights Act.

“What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote. “What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’”

On Aug. 4, 2020, the day of Arizona’s primary election, the law was still relatively new and was still being litigated in the courts. Fuentes was stationed outside a local cultural center to support city council candidates and hand out campaign literature. At one point during the day, Fuentes’ neighbor, Juarez, approached her and handed her a ballot.

What Fuentes didn’t realize was that Gary Snyder, a local Republican, was recording cell phone video outside the polling place. In the 2020 primary, Snyder was running for city council as a write-in candidate and in 2022 he would run for state Senate. Both attempts were unsuccessful.

He shared the footage with David Lara, another local Republican who had unsuccessfully run for office numerous times in San Luis. In an interview, Lara and Snyder said the footage showed the type of voter fraud that has swung elections in San Luis for decades.

“If there would have been 10 Gary Snyders with cameras, we would have caught many people doing the same thing all throughout the day,” Lara said.

“Out of 10 elections in San Luis, eight or nine have been won because of fraud,” he added.

In the video recorded by Snyder, Fuentes appears to write something on the ballot and then hands Juarez a stack of ballots to bring into the polling place. The interaction was the type of voter assistance Fuentes had provided for countless other community members. Yuma County officials later verified that the voters signed their own ballot envelopes, and the ballots were counted.

The Yuma County Sheriff’s Office and the state attorney general’s office eventually learned of the footage, and Brnovich’s Election Integrity Unit launched an investigation. People in San Luis reported that uniformed sheriff’s deputies knocked on their doors early in the morning to ask about their voting history, which alarmed many residents, according to a brief filed by Arizona voting rights groups in the Supreme Court case.

Prosecutors charged Fuentes with conspiracy, forgery, and two counts of ballot abuse. In court documents, the state said Fuentes “appears to have been caught on video running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods, and then using another person to bring the ballots the last few yards into the ballot box.” She pleaded guilty to one count of ballot abuse, a felony, and the state dropped the more serious charges.

Lara and Snyder said that Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, the leaders of True the Vote — a far-right group that has promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud — reached out to them. The claims of ballot harvesting in San Luis became a crucial component of “2000 Mules,” a documentary directed by right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in May 2022 which falsely claimed that voter fraud, specifically a significant amount of ballot harvesting by so-called “ballot mules,” swung the results of the 2020 election.

“They’re the ones that actually helped us to make this problem national,” Lara said in an interview.

But many in San Luis said they don’t trust Lara and Snyder, whom they described as disgruntled former candidates for office who are trying to discredit Democrats. Yuma County Supervisor Lynne Pancrazi said she is upset by the national reputation they’ve attached to San Luis. They “are giving such a bad name to this community,” she said.

Fuentes jailed, held in isolation

Across San Luis in mid-October, people who know Fuentes appeared shocked that their friend and former mayor was two dozen miles away in Yuma, Arizona, jailed and held in isolation for a month either because of her age and health or her position as a public figure. Chapman said the jail has given different explanations for why she was held in a cell alone.

Soaking in the October sun outside the San Luis library, Pancrazi, who served as a character witness at a hearing prior to Fuentes’ sentencing, described Fuentes’ quiet but caring demeanor.

“She’s not a criminal,” Pancrazi said. “She’s someone who was helping her community just like she’s done her entire life.”

Manuel Castro, a pastor at the Gethsemane Baptist Church in San Luis, agreed. “It’s too much punishment for people doing a little mistake,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a little mistake.”

The harsh sentence will also help conservatives “further the narrative that there is actual fraud in our elections, which there was no evidence of here,” said Andy Gaona, a Phoenix-based election lawyer who represented Fuentes in a special action petition with a state appeals court.

San Luis residents also lamented the inequities in voter fraud prosecution. Brnovich’s office requested a year in prison for Fuentes, and while the judge only sentenced her to a month in jail plus two years’ probation, even that is inconsistent with the sentences others have received for similar crimes.

Chapman commissioned a report from Rich Robertson, a legal investigator and former journalist, to put the state’s recommended sentence into perspective.

Robertson’s report detailed 79 prosecutions for voting crimes in Arizona between 2005 and August 2022. In general, he found that, other than Fuentes, people without a prior criminal history or who are not already imprisoned do not receive jail or prison time for voting crimes.

“Nobody goes to jail or prison for this stuff, unless they’ve already had some kind of priors,” Robertson said. He found two exceptions: One person who received a suspended sentence, and another was also convicted of influencing a witness and not just a voting crime.

In one notable example included in Robertson’s report, Brnovich’s office requested a lighter sentence for Tracey Kay McKee, a?64-year-old Republican white woman?in the more affluent city of Scottsdale, Arizona, who pleaded guilty to casting a ballot in her dead mother’s name. She was?sentenced in April?to two years of probation and no jail time.

Juarez, who carried the voted ballots into the polling place, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to one year of probation and no jail time.

Robertson said he believes there were “a lot of political aspects” to this prosecution and that Fuentes was given a harsher sentence because of the national attention and her prominence as a target in the far-right “Stop the Steal” campaign.

“There was a lot of political pressure being exerted all over the place to make an example out of this particular defendant,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the national spotlight being on Yuma County and Ms. Fuentes, I don’t think this outcome would have been the same.”

Norm Eisen, a longtime election lawyer who advised the Obama White House on ethics and government reform, called Fuentes’ sentence an “outrageous miscarriage of justice.”

“The relatively narrow conduct that formed the basis of the sentencing should not result in jail time and indeed in the vast majority of the United States, would not do so,” he said.

He called Brnovich’s sentencing request “a tragic and a cruel posture,” especially in “a smaller community where this kind of a sentencing has a chilling effect, even on legal behavior.”

At a hearing in October, Fuentes’ attorneys presented a number of character witnesses who spoke about her childhood, her work growing a business, and her position as a leader in the community. But at Fuentes’ sentencing hearing, Yuma County Superior Court Judge Roger Nelson said he does not believe she accepted responsibility for her crime and that her role as a community leader, although admirable, actually works against her.

“Many of the things that were put forward as mitigating factors, I think they’re also aggravating factors,”?he said. “You have been a leader in the San Luis community for a long time. People look up to you, people respect you, and they look to what you do.”

Life after jail

Fuentes was released from jail in November and is now back in the community on probation, coming to terms with having lost her voting rights for the next two years because of her felony conviction. She said she already knows of San Luis residents who have stopped voting after seeing what she went through.

“I say don’t be afraid,” she said, explaining what she tells her friends and neighbors in San Luis. “And they say, because you weren’t afraid, you were in jail, Guilla.”

Fuentes said that the San Luis community stood behind her throughout the legal process, showing up to support her and her family when she was at her lowest. The day she was released from jail, her family and friends gathered at her mom’s house. She walked in and saw the large crowd holding signs and two big pots of menudo, a traditional Mexican soup, that she had requested as her first meal back.

It was just what she needed — to be around friends and a home cooked meal after spending a month in isolation. “I lost 10 pounds in jail and I gained them back the day I left,” she said.

When Brnovich?announced indictments?of two more women — San Luis City Council Member Gloria Torres and Nadia Lizarraga-Mayorquin — in October for allegedly collecting other people’s ballots, Marquez said he feared that more people would face jail time. A representative for Kris Mayes, Arizona’s newly elected Democratic attorney general, said the office is still undecided on how it will handle their prosecutions, but Mayes has said she?will transition?the office’s Election Integrity Unit from prosecuting voter fraud to protecting voting rights.

Democrats in the Arizona House?introduced a bill?this session to repeal the ballot collection ban, but it’s unlikely to move forward given the Republican majority.

“It’s starting again for other people,” Castro said. “It never ends. It’s never finished. It’s so hard for the community, really. It’s so hard.”