by Patrick M. Peterson, Ph.D.
Prior to Kentucky’s general election on November 5, 2019, a statewide poll showed Michael Adams (R) trailing his better-known opponent Heather French Henry (D) by 15 percentage points in the electoral race for Kentucky Secretary of State. Although the biggest concurrent state race on the ballot that year would be won by then Governor-Elect Andy Beshear (D), Adams managed to defy the polling data to win his race rather easily. Television viewers may have noticed that both Adams and Beshear benefitted from surprising jumps in their on-screen tallies, just when their opponents seemed to be gaining ground. Although dismissed by “experts” as technical glitches, a full accounting of on-screen vote count irregularities was never reported. Similar artifacts occurred on national TV during the 2020 Presidential Election tally, a race later proven subject to fraudulent voting as detailed in the documentary film “2000 Mules.”
If there has been one consistent theme to Adams’ tenure as Kentucky Secretary of State, it has been the relentless spreading of pro-election-integrity propaganda, despite no particular evidence ever presented that Kentucky’s elections have run unhindered by hacked election totals or manipulated voting machines. In fact, the Louisville Courier-Journal had reported on how Kentucky’s electronic voting machines were easily hacked at the 2017 DEFCON hackers conference, which led to a flurry of federal and state dollars in the millions being spent on more electoral technology, including then-Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes’ controversial hiring of a cyber-security firm called CyberScout to overhaul and upgrade Kentucky’s electoral technology. What’s unclear, unproven, and very much in doubt is whether all that hoopla led to freer and fairer elections over the past 3 years, or whether perhaps instead the technological ability to commit electronic fraud has simply been enhanced.
Fast-forward to Kentucky’s May 17, 2022, Primary Election, and more importantly its aftermath. While the Republican Party ostensibly basks in its “super-majority” status in the General Assembly, Secretary Adams has revealed over the past month a remarkable fear and obsession about the possibility of paper-ballot-count challenges to a small handful of Republican primaries. When candidate Courtney Gilbert filed a petition for a self-funded paper ballot recount in the District 24 Republican House race, the judge initially set her bond at $24,000 in a secret hearing in which not even Gilbert was allowed to be present. After filing a challenge to the costs, Gilbert was allowed a public hearing that worried Adams enough to send his Assistant Secretary of State in person. Adams then launched a public wave of vitriol against all candidates requesting self-funded paper-ballot recounts, declaring they are not “real Republicans” and “want to watch the world burn”. If a hand count of actual paper ballots, the actual votes cast in any particular district equates to the “world burning”, we naturally ask “who’s world would this burn exactly?” Maybe Adams is revealing something deeply personal here, such as a world of corruption he oversees? Such recounts are the legal right of every candidate under current Kentucky law and are completely innocuous if the election was conducted and the machines operated with the highest integrity (where the paper ballot count should match the machine count precisely). Yet Adams jumped into a full-blown public assault against the law, crusading for new legislation that would ban such direct vote counting in all cases except where the machine count resulted in less than a 1 percentage point difference between the top two candidates. We wonder though, if it is possible to program a machine to result in false counts, then it is presumably just as easy to program a large margin of victory as a narrow one. And if such re-programming is not possible, then what harm would be done by simply verifying for a few races that the machines did in fact count the ballots correctly?
Dramatically throwing all political capital into opposition to paper-ballot recounts is grossly inconsistent with Adams’ repeated claims that the machines are infallible and beyond reproach. Instead, Adams looks every bit the corrupt politician acting desperately to hide something. His words and actions indicate a complete vote of “no confidence” in recent machine tallies. How else are we to interpret his bizarre opposition to a few candidate-funded recounts? If Adams’ rhetoric matched reality, he should be unconcerned to the point of complete indifference to such rare requests for paper-ballot counts. Which leads all of us who are paying attention to wonder, what is really going on here?
When Bridgette Ehly decided to challenge Kentucky Speaker of the House David Osborne (R) in the 2022 House District 59 Republican Primary, most would acknowledge such an effort as a longshot, or even quixotic. Ehly was a mostly unknown political novice challenging the heart of the state’s political power base. The election night’s machine-count tally showed Osborne winning handily, by a margin of 68% to 32% of the vote, and like so many others who have lost landslide elections, we might reasonably expect never to hear from Ehly again. Nonetheless, Mrs. Ehly filed for a self-funded paper-ballot count; and despite a bond being set at grossly exaggerated costs of $21,700, Ehly in fact paid the bond in full on June 16. Again, we might reasonably expect a quiet recount occurring, with no particular surprises found, and the matter over without fanfare within a week or so. But instead, Adams continued his relentless public attacks on the process, referring to candidates like Ehly as “sore losers”. The Kentucky Board of Elections, no doubt at Adams’ urging, filed suit to stop the District 59 paper-ballot count that had already been paid for by Mrs. Ehly. One might presume Speaker Osborne would be embarrassed by the theatrics of Secretary Adams and the Board of Elections, and urge them to leave all this alone. That would be the natural interpretation assuming Osborne has nothing to hide and no reason to fear a paper-ballot count. But amazingly, the state’s Republican leadership in locked step seems determined to demonize paper-ballot counts and pursue every legal avenue to prevent any paper-ballot recount from seeing the light of day. We must all ask, why?
On June 27, following a motion to dismiss by the Kentucky Board of Elections, Bridgette Ehly’s recount petition was generally dismissed, without even a refund of the entire $21,700 already paid by Ehly per Kentucky law. Can anyone paying attention honestly walk away from this charade of justice believing the primary election in District 59 was honest, fair, and beyond the possibility of fraud? I know if I were any Democrat running for office in November, this episode would be red meat to relentlessly hammer any Republican opponent, a truly embarrassing escapade by a party leadership apparently too drunk with power to even recognize their own complicity with such transparent corruption.
A generation ago, corrupt Democrats ran the state government. Today there are new bosses…but much the same as the old bosses. It’s time for a new approach to Kentucky politics.
