Voter suppression is enshrined in Kentucky law. Coronavirus primary showed us a better way.
Mitchell Stephens lives in Lexington, but works in Shelbyville. At 6:01 p.m. on Tuesday, he hurried across the Kroger Field parking lot to get to the polls, only to be stopped in his tracks by an election official. State law says voters have to be in line at 6 p.m. and that is that.
“I tried to get here, but I was behind one car too many,” he said, clearly frustrated. “Today is very important to me.”
This is what voter suppression looks like, and it’s not from our new makeshift coronavirus voting system, even if a million celebrity tweets told us it was. It’s right there in Kentucky law, and it keeps people from exercising their right to vote.
In Louisville, the quick-moving campaign of Charles Booker (the same campaign, incidentally, that got Hollywood so worried about new voter suppression), filed an injunction to let the people who’d been held up in traffic at the Expo Center entrance into the building to vote. The judge agreed to add on an extra half-hour.
Kentucky and Indiana are the only states that close polls as early as 6 p.m., which is absurdly early. Kentucky’s election laws also make it extremely difficult to request an absentee ballot, and has no early voting of any kind.
The coronavirus primary showed us a new and better way of doing things. The compromise between Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, was aimed at keeping our elderly poll workers from infection. It loosened up Kentucky’s restrictive laws, allowing for the first time no-excuse absentee ballots, early voting and fewer polling places. It gave voters a taste of freedom, of what other states do to encourage voting, rather than discourage it. And judging from Adams’ prediction that over one million people may have voted Tuesday, people were encouraged. That would be close to a record for primary voting in Kentucky.
Still, some mistakes were made and lessons were learned on Tuesday. It was a mistake to confine voting in Lexington and Louisville to only one site each, even though Lexington was the only place where lines lasted between one and a half and two hours all day. Incidentally, the apparently unanticipated crush of people at Kroger Field meant that the reason for voting in one place — to spread out to avoid coronavirus — seemed somewhat forgotten. Even when Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins added two more check-in stations, the wait was still about one and a half hours, particularly at the end when more people showed up.
“I think it’s (Tuesday) a good example of how a decision that’s well-intentioned and making the best of a bad situation can have an impact,” said former Secretary of State Trey Grayson. “It’s not just laws that can have an impact, it’s individual decisions.”
Most people I talked to at Kroger Field were strangely cheerful, even after hot sun and rain showers, many pointing out that the wait could have been avoided if they’d bothered or remembered to do their absentee ballot.
Aaron Tolson stood in line for an hour and a half and pronounced it “well worth it.”
“Look at this turnout, it’s awesome,” he said, pointing to the long lines behind him. “This is what we get for not filling out the ballot. But I’ve always voted in person.”
Elections are complicated beasts. Remember back in 2018, when numerous people in Lexington had to wait an hour or more to vote? At first we thought it was huge turnout, but in fact, it was a really long ballot filled out with antiquated voting machines.
This time around, I talked to people who missed going to their precincts, and people who really missed getting the results on election night, instead of a week later as is predicted. Others really liked the convenience of mailing in their ballots.
But as with nearly everything these days, we’ve been shown a new way of doing things. We’ve been shown that the old model of people filing into schools and churches in a short window of time is obsolete. It’s not yet clear what will happen in November, but I hope the state adopts at least some of these changes. After all, if more people voted, not fewer, isn’t that a good thing?
This story was originally published June 24, 2020 at 9:56 AM.
