Grimes blames new law limiting her powers for errors in primary election vote totals

The State Board of Elections delayed certifying the results of the May 21 primary election Tuesday after Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes said her office found several discrepancies in the official results.

In a letter she hand delivered to the board Tuesday, Grimes said she found more than 50 errors in 20 counties, causing the board to delay their certification until Friday. Grimes said there were transcription errors and numerical differences between unofficial and official results. Neither affected the outcome of any election.

“In my near eight years as chief election official, I’ve never had a certification go forward where we didn’t have an answer for every question and discrepancy for what was unofficially recorded versus what was certified on election day here,” Grimes said.

Grimes immediately used the discrepancies to support her argument that the State Board of Elections is in chaos in the aftermath of a new law that removed her power over the board. Under the new law, she remains the state’s chief elections official but is no longer the chairwoman of the elections board. She is now a non-voting member of the board.

Grimes’ office is responsible for receiving official results from the County Boards of Election and the State Board of Elections is responsible for tallying the votes. Every year, there are slight differences between the unofficial results tallied on election night and the official results that are certified, but Grimes said she also found errors when staff transcribed numbers from one form to another.

Grimes said staff of the State Board of Elections should have done a better job of double checking the results before presenting them to the board. The staff needs more oversight, she said.

“These errors that I found here today are errors that the State Board of Elections staff should have presented to the board themselves,” Grimes said. “What I’ve presented to the board is to make sure that they did not attest and put their name to certification totals where one plus one did not equal two.”

When pressed about how the new law changed her responsibility to check election results, Grimes pointed to the fact that she’s now a non-voting member of the board. The bill, though, did not change her responsibilities as the state’s chief elections officer.

“I had a vote overseeing the board and actually attesting to the authenticity of what was actually provided by our vote total certification,” Grimes said. “That’s my role in the process previously and obviously [House Bill] 114 has changed that.”

The new board chairman, Josh Branscum, R-Albany, said he didn’t think the new law was at fault.

“No, not necessarily, no,” Branscum said. “I think there’s just some clarifications that need to be made and the board is going to do everything it can to move forward.”

Grimes has stepped up her battle against the new law in recent months, which came after a three-part series published by the Lexington Herald-Leader and ProPublica examined the unprecedented power she had accumulated over the State Board of Elections.

She requested a temporary and permanent injunction against the law in Franklin Circuit Court two weeks before Election Day. Her request for a temporary injunction was denied, but a line in the judge’s ruling has made two new members, both retired county clerks, question whether they are voting members.

The state senator responsible for the bill, Majority Floor Leader Damon Thayer, said the law clearly intends for the two new members to have voting privileges and called Grimes’ comments Tuesday “beyond absurd.”

“House Bill 114 removed Secretary Grimes as a voting member of the State Board of Elections, but she still remains the Chief Election Official in Kentucky,” Thayer said. “When it comes to election-related issues, the buck stops with her. I urge the secretary of state to quit playing political games, do her job, and use everything in her power to ensure that our election results are correct and certified.”

The relationship between Grimes and State Board of Elections Executive Director Jared Dearing has been tense since he filed a complaint last August alleging she was abusing her role as chairwoman of the board by ignoring requirements of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to clean the state’s voter rolls and improperly using the state’s voter registration system. The dispute has created a environment of warring factions between the Office of the Secretary of State and the State Board of Elections.

This story was originally published June 4, 2019 at 2:21 PM with the headline "Grimes blames new law limiting her powers for errors in primary election vote totals."