Rand Paul urges KY lawmakers to pass election security measures that already exist.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul Thursday called on the Kentucky General Assembly to pass a law enhancing the security of Kentucky’s elections, while raising concerns about how the 2020 general election was conducted in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“It’s not really a criticism of anything happening in Kentucky,” Paul said. “It’s a preemptive way of making sure that we don’t run into these problems in the future that other states had.”
Paul said his top concern was that making sure that only the state legislature can change how elections are conducted, not the Secretary of State, which could be seen as a criticism of what happened in Kentucky.
Because of the pandemic, the authority over how to conduct both the primary and general elections in 2020 was handed over to Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, and Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat. The two came to a bipartisan agreement to expand both in-person and mail-in voting out of concerns of spreading the virus.
Despite touting the success of the Kentucky elections, the legislature stripped that power from Adams and Beshear this year by passing Senate Bill 1, which prevents the secretary of state and governor from determining the manner of an election during an emergency. The bill is currently being challenged in court.
Paul also said he felt Kentucky law should encourage in-person voting over mail-in voting (Kentucky already has restrictive mail-in voter laws, as the provisions for the 2020 election were temporary) and suggested that there should be a law requiring the automatic removal of voters who have died or moved away from the voter rolls.
Both state and federal law already require the purging of the voter rolls and former Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes was put under a consent decree from the Department of Justice for not following the law.
“It’s not really clear why he was speaking to this committee,” said Josh Douglas, an election law expert at the University of Kentucky. “He didn’t really provide any insights that I found were meaningful takeaways.”
Republicans have long touted election security — Adams said often in his campaign that he wanted to make it “easy to vote but hard to cheat” — but there has been a renewed push after former President Donald Trump spent months claiming that November election was stolen from him, even though his campaign’s arguments were struck down by the courts.
Paul, who was one of the Senators who echoed that criticism by saying the election “was in many ways stolen,” toned down his rhetoric in the committee meeting. He said everyone needs to be careful about the language they use surrounding elections. Paul was among the Republican Senators who voted to certify the election on the same day that a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. On Thursday, he compared those riots to last summer’s protests against racial inequality.
Paul has since said he does not sign on to the belief that the 2020 election was stolen, saying state and local officials often made ballot-counting decisions that should be reserved to the consent of the state legislative body. Courts disagreed with Paul in many of these cases, but he said it was a fight worth having.
”It shouldn’t be that contentious of an idea to pass a new law that says you can’t pass any law without the state legislature voting on it,” he said in an interview last month. The time allotted to receive ballots after Election Day is of particular concern to him.
The testimony could be the first of several across the country, as Paul said he would devote time this year to lobbying state legislatures across the country to change or clarify their election laws, potentially even embarking on a tour.
In Kentucky, three representatives are working on a bill regarding Kentucky’s elections. The group — which includes Rep. Josh Branscum, R-Russell Springs, who was the former chairman of the State Board of Elections — has not yet filed their bill, even though the deadline for new bills is Thursday.
Democrats in the House Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Government Affairs raised concerns over the fact that they haven’t seen a draft of the legislation yet.
“We did not have a single, specific proposal of what’s going to be in this bill,” said Rep. Mackenzie Cantrell, D-Louisville.
It is not uncommon for members of the majority party to add new language to an existing bill after the bill filing deadline. Committee chairman Kevin Bratcher, R-Louisville, said members will get a copy of the bill Monday, before voting bringing it to a vote Tuesday.
McClatchy D.C. reporter David Catanese contributed reporting.
This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 12:26 PM.
