State Board of Elections votes to settle with top staffer who blew whistle on Grimes
The Kentucky State Board of Elections unanimously voted Tuesday to settle a wrongful termination lawsuit with a former top staffer who was fired after raising complaints about former Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.
“This is not an admission of guilt,” said Luke Morgan, outside counsel for the State Board of Elections. “Rather this is just for resolution of this. The state board has remained firm that it has no liability, it is not admitting that it has done anything improperly.”
Matt Selph, who was fired in 2017 and filed a lawsuit in civil court a month later, claimed he lost his job because he reported suspected mismanagement and violations of the law by Grimes. Selph claimed he was protected as a “whistleblower” because he had filed formal complaints with the Executive Branch Ethics Commission and four members of the State Board of Elections.
The state will pay Selph $142,500 in taxpayer money. The amount was reviewed by the governor’s office and is being approved by the attorney general’s office.
“Hopefully it’s a new day for the secretary of state’s office,” said Dale Golden, Selph’s attorney. “We’re glad to put this behind us and move forward with Mr. Selph’s career.”
Secretary of State Michael Adams was on the State Board of Elections when Selph was fired. He voted against Selph’s firing.
Selph’s original allegations, combined with a similar complaint from current executive director Jared Dearing a year later, led former Attorney General Andy Beshear to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the claims against Grimes. That investigation is still ongoing, according to Elizabeth Kuhn, communications director for Attorney General Daniel Cameron.
Both the Kentucky Personnel Board and the Executive Branch Ethics Commission launched investigations but neither has taken any public action.
The vote signals an attempt by the board to move past its contentious relationship with Grimes, whose term as Secretary of State expired in 2019.
The Kentucky legislature stripped much of the secretary of state’s power over the elections board in 2019, after an investigation by the Lexington Herald-Leader and ProPublica found that Grimes had used her authority over the board to push through a contract with a political donor and allowed her staff to search hundreds of names in the state’s voter registration database without providing a reason.
Selph filed a 14-page complaint against Grimes in the fall of 2017 claiming Grimes had taken unprecedented power over the State Board of Elections. In a contentious meeting that October, Grimes convinced the board to fire Selph, later saying it was for “the protection of workers at the State Board of Elections.”
In 2019, Don Blevins Sr., who was on the board at the time, called the allegations against Selph “weak.” Interviews with 25 people who worked with Selph failed to turn up anyone who witnessed harassment.
Grimes denied Selph’s allegations that he was improperly fired at the time, calling them “politically motivated” because Selph is a registered Republican. Her spokesman at the time, Bradford Queen, said at the time that the “State Board of Elections will vigorously defend this suit.”
“The executive director and assistant to the director are political appointees and serve at its pleasure,” Queen said in 2017. “The board determined it was time for a new direction in leadership for the protection of its employees and the betterment of the agency.”
This story was originally published September 15, 2020 at 12:52 PM.
