Long lines, slow data. Ky’s election hiccups must be fixed. Immediately.
The board that oversees Kentucky’s elections got a legislative hammering on Thursday about long lines and slow results on election night.
Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Louisville, who’s the co-chair of the Legislative Oversight and Investigations Committee, showed a video from Tuesday afternoon that followed the very long line of voters wrapped around a South Oldham Middle School, and asked why the State Board of Elections had approved a plan without enough polling locations.
“It’s very very slow,” Rep. Ken Fleming, another Louisville Republican who saw long lines in his district, said. “To me, you’ve gone backwards ...it was totally a frustration to everyone I talked to.”
SBE Executive Director Karen Sellers said the board has chosen to change its election reporting vendor from a “foreign company,” to in-house for the first time, and there were blips. A lot of them. The board and county clerks blamed each other when results would not upload properly. The SBE website is slow and clunky. The Associated Press only looks at numbers from the Board of Elections. As a result, the most important race on the ballot, Amendment 2, was not called until Wednesday morning.
It doesn’t really matter whose fault it was, it needs to get fixed before the governor’s race next year, and a general election in 2023. Thanks to Trumpworld, people are ready to be suspicious and start the kind of conspiracies that led to Jan. 6. That’s why public confidence is so important, and why, the hiccups of Tuesday night needed much faster solution and explanation.
Legislators may be regretting their move against former Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, when they removed SBE oversight from the Secretary’s office, something that current Secretary of State Michael Adams called an “over-correction.”
Look for more changes in January, when the General Assembly reconvenes. As Nemes noted the State Board of Elections is appointed, not elected. “Why don’t we transfer this to Secretary of State so I can hold him accountable?” he asked.
I spoke with Adams before the legislative meeting, and he had some interesting observations on Tuesday’s results.
First, “misinformation lost.”
“People came out in numbers and they voted and that’s a vote of confidence in our system,” he said. “They rejected those voices of conspiracy and came out.”
Second, Kentucky liked early voting and it’s bipartisan. “It’s used by both sides in equivalent fashion,” Adams said. “That helps me think it will be permanent.”
But as noted, lots of people still like to vote on election day, and with a very long ballot, there were too many lines. County Clerks and the state board have a year to sort it out, but as the county clerks’ association pointed out to legislators on Thursday, they could use a lot more funding to pay more poll workers.
Election roundup
Some other thoughts left from the election:
▪ Has the fever broken? Nationally and in Kentucky, people rejected extremism, whether with election deniers or anti-abortion measures. The red wave did not sweep over Congress. In Kentucky, the GOP supermajority got a little bigger, but, as I wrote about Wednesday, the same people who voted for Rand Paul and Republican legislators also defeated Amendment 2, which would have explicitly denied abortion as a constitutional right.
“One of the exciting things is how the abortion issue wasn’t just something that mobilized Democrats, it swung independents and even Republicans,” said Steve Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky. “People underestimate how many pro-choice Republicans are out there. In Ky’s case especially, it’s people we would have called anti-abortion voters, but who are not in favor as regulations as stringent as the current trigger law.”
We still don’t know who controls the U.S. House and Senate, but Donald Trump is getting blamed all around for poor candidates. Sanity may yet prevail.
▪ The Year of the Woman. Mayor, Sheriff, County Attorney, Commonwealth’s Attorney and NINE of Lexington’s Urban County Council seats were won by women, ushering in a new era in Lexington politics. Of those, five are Black women and one is Latina. Of 14 circuit and district judges, 10 are now women.
Ellen Riggle, a political scientist who chairs UK’s Gender and Women’s Studies, said that Lexington had early boundary breakers like former Mayor Pam Miller and Vice-Mayor Isabel Yates, which helped women realize they could do more than work behind the scenes despite male domination of politics.
“I think it’s a legacy of their involvement in elected local office that we continue to see,” Riggle said. “It spreads and the more women who are elected, the more women who will run and be involved.”
Even among the men, there’s new diversity — the top vote-getter of the at-large candidates, Dan Wu, will be our first Asian-American council member and vice-mayor, and the second, James Brown, is Black. The status quo must go, voters said.
‘Crime’ candidates? Lexington’s increased violence was absolutely the top topic of Lexington’s races, but it did not propel law and order candidates into office. David Kloiber’s hammering of Linda Gorton on crime did not make a dent. Candidates, some of them former policeman, who made violence and police recruitment their only platform, like Ross Mann, J.J. Lombardi and Raymond Alexander, didn’t prevail. We’ll see how those results influence upcoming discussions about big raises for the Lexington Police Department and other emergency responders.
