‘Daunting task.’ Kentucky county clerks scramble to hold vote-by-mail election.
Kentucky’s primary election is on June 23. Sort of.
By then, though, almost everyone will have already cast their vote.
Some people have already started voting by absentee ballot, and those will become widely available in coming days. Every county in the state is supposed to offer in-person voting by appointment only starting June 8. The last day to mail in your ballot is June 23. The last day for county election officials to transmit vote totals to the Secretary of State’s office is June 30th.
Welcome to voting in the middle of a global pandemic.
“A regular election is super hard,” said Gabrielle Summe, the Kenton County Clerk. “There’s a lot of moving pieces, there’s a lot of logistics. This election, no one really knows what to expect.”
This April, as COVID-19 spread through the state, Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams came to an agreement: they would let Kentuckians vote by mail.
The reasons were simple: the coronavirus spreads easily in large crowds and most poll workers are older than 65, making them particularly vulnerable to deadly complications from the virus.
The shift, though, means election officials in a state with some of the most restrictive voting laws in the country will have less than two months to prepare for an election that will be conducted mostly by mail.
“Kentucky is not set up for this kind of system,” Summe said.
The result has been a mad dash by county clerks across the state to prepare for an election in which everyone will be encouraged to vote from the comfort — and safety — of their homes.
Instead of setting up precincts throughout each county for a normal election, most counties will have only one in-person polling place on Election Day. And some clerks said they’d prefer people not use it.
That has meant scaling up each county’s ability to process absentee ballots. In a typical Kentucky election only 1.5 to 2 percent of the votes are absentee ballots, according to the State Board of Elections. This election, officials hope that number is close to 100 percent.
“Every Kentuckian should vote absentee in this election,” Beshear said at a news conference last week. “It is the safest way.”
A different kind of election
As the clerk in Kentucky’s second largest county, Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins is concerned the state isn’t equipped to handle a vote-by-mail election.
“This is going to be very difficult to pull off for both large and small counties,” Blevins said. “We’re just not set up or configured for vote by mail.”
He said the difficulties start with just getting a ballot.
Kentucky normally requires a two-step process for getting an absentee ballot. First, the voter must call and request an application for an absentee ballot, providing a reason why they can’t vote in person (a new executive order allows everyone to cite a “medical emergency” because of the pandemic). Then, county clerks mail the the application, which must be sent back before receiving an official ballot.
To streamline that process, the State Board of Elections is setting up an online portal where people can fill out an online application to request an absentee ballot, trimming the process to just one step.
The portal is set to launch Friday. It will need to handle a high volume of voters, raising concerns among some clerks that it might crash, forcing Kentuckians to revert to the more complicated two-step process.
Meanwhile, county clerks across the state are scaling back to one large polling place on Election Day. In Kenton County, it’s the convention center; in Daviess County, it’s the Owensboro Sportscenter; Fayette County is still considering several large venues.
That leaves Blevins worried about the volume of mail-in ballots. He thinks it’s possible that more people than usual will choose to vote because they can do so from home, and that at least 40 percent of the ballots will probably come in during the last week, potentially overwhelming his staff.
Put that on top of depleted staffs as county clerks try to follow social distancing protocols — in McCracken County, the staff has been working in shifts in case someone comes down with COVID-19 — and it creates a messy process.
The state has given clerks some extra time to count the ballots, delaying the reporting of results until June 30. But the executive order says ballots only have to be postmarked by June 23, which means counties could still be collecting votes a few days after Election Day.
After the ballots are in, the law requires county clerks to do more than count votes. They must complete a process called “signature cures,” making sure a voter’s signature on the ballot matches their signature in the voter registration database.
Blevins said signatures in the voter registration database are “woefully inadequate.” If the signatures don’t match, clerks must contact the voter to get proof of their signature.
“It’s going to be a very crazy time,” Blevins said.
‘We’re going to do it’
Kentucky officials are trying to learn quickly from other states that have conducted successful vote-by-mail elections, such as Nebraska, Colorado and Hawaii.
Nebraska held its primary election on May 12. After encouraging people to vote by mail in a method similar to Kentucky, the state saw a record number of voters in their primary.
In the 2016 primary, Nebraska collected about 313,000 ballots, about 18 percent of which were mailed. This year, 86 percent of the 484,000 ballots were mailed.
“You can scale up an election to be able to accommodate this,” said Wayne Bena, Nebraska’s deputy secretary of state for elections. “And we were able to show that you can hold an election safely by using our existing laws.”
Amber McReynolds is the former elections director in Denver who now serves as executive director of Vote at Home, a non-profit that encourages states to conduct elections by mail. She said an in-person election is an extremely difficult process that involves a lot of moving pieces — precincts, election officers, tallying ballots — and that in many ways voting by mail is easier.
“It’s totally doable to set this up in a short time frame,” McReynolds said. “Kentucky needs to rely on the people who have done this before and not try to reinvent the wheel.”
Clerks across the state have adopted some of those suggestions. The State Board of Elections, for example, is issuing a standard set of guidelines for double-checking signatures that’s based on best practices in other states. Counties are setting up drop boxes for people who don’t want to put their ballots in the mail. McReynolds said her organization has found that most voters prefer to use a drop box instead of the post office.
But Kentucky has its own difficulties, the primary one being that people usually don’t vote absentee. Nebraska has a much higher percentage of people who vote by mail in a normal election than Kentucky.
“I would say most people have never voted by absentee ballot,” said Julie Griggs, the McCracken County Clerk. “We do absentee voting every election, this is just a larger scale.”
Because of that, county clerks are pushing to raise awareness of absentee voting. Summe, in Kenton County, said people have expressed concerns to her about the security of their ballot when they vote by mail, but she has assured them it is safe.
“I don’t think people should worry about security, I don’t think people should worry about their vote not counting,” Summe said.
There are still people resistant to voting by mail, she said. That’s why she secured the Northern Kentucky Convention Center as the county’s polling place. She warned, however, that there could be long wait times if a lot of people show up on Election Day.
Blevins said people should consider the risk of contracting the coronavirus if they vote in person. He said in-person voting should be limited to those people who have disabilities that require them to vote in person.
Richard House, the deputy county clerk in Daviess County, said he’s working to make the process of voting by mail as easy as possible and is hiring six temporary workers to help through the election.
“It’s a daunting task for clerks across the state,” House said. “It’s an extreme circumstance, but we’re going to do it.”
This story was originally published May 21, 2020 at 1:57 PM.
