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‘Profile in Courage:’ Kentuckian Michael Adams honored for protecting election integrity

McKenna Horsley — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 02:00:36 +0000

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, speaks to a crowd while accepting the 2024 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. (Screenshot via JFK Library Foundation livestream)

Accepting the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award Sunday night, Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams thanked the JFK Library Foundation for incentivizing political courage “because it may be needed now more than ever before.”?

Adams, a Republican who was elected to a second term last fall, was selected for his work to increase voting days in Kentucky, as well as for standing up for free and fair elections despite ire from fellow Republicans and death threats from election deniers. His selection was announced in May; the ceremony took place Sunday night at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.?

“Today’s politics penalizes the workhorse and rewards the showhorse,” Adams told the gala gathering. “It prizes provocateurs and punishes problem solvers, and now that social media have made everybody an expert in everything, we risk dissent from the Madisonian model of democracy, in which we elect our best as trustees to run our government on our behalf, to a tainted model, in which independent and judicious thought in our leaders is not encouraged. Indeed, leadership is out and followership is in.”?

In his remarks to the crowd, Adams reflected on steps he took during his first term to maintain election access and integrity in 2020 — when a heated presidential race was on the ballot and before there was a vaccine for the highly contagious coronavirus that held the world in the grip of a pandemic. Adams worked with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to protect Kentuckians’ access to the ballot safely. That included expanded absentee voting and early voting days, the latter being something that Adams continues to support heading into this year’s presidential election.?

Jack Schlossberg, member of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award committee, left, presents Secretary of State Michael Adams with the award. (Screenshot via JFK Library Foundation livestream)

Jack Schlossberg, the only grandson of the former president and member of the award committee, said that Adams’ alliance with Beshear “wasn’t easy, and he took a lot of heat for it.” Adams’ respect for the 2020 presidential election results also made him a political target within his own party.?

“Adams, his staff — even his family — received death threats and physical confrontations, and members of his own party recruited two challengers to unseat him in a primary,” Schlossberg said. “It got so bleak that in 2020, Adams believed his political career might be over. He responded with optimism and courage. His strategy was simple, but not easy.”?

Schlossberg added that many of those pandemic-era voting changes later became permanent in Kentucky. Adams was the top vote-getter among constitutional candidates during the 2023 general election, winning 118 of 120 counties.?

Adams was given the award not for opposing fellow Republicans, Schlossberg said, but “because he put himself, his family and his career on the line to protect the right to vote.”

“We honor his political courage tonight by casting our ballots in November,” Schlossberg said. “His sacrifice is a great reminder to all of us: the right to vote is sacred. Don’t throw it away by staying home or voting for someone who can’t win.”

Created by members of the Kennedy family in 1989, the award honors public officials who demonstrate leadership in the spirit of “Profiles in Courage,” the president’s book about eight U.S. senators who took unpopular stands despite opposition from constituents and their political parties.?

Adams said Kennedy’s observations about the pressure politicians face in that book, published in 1956, are “timeless,” and that courage by all public servants, including secretaries of state, county clerks, health officials, school board members and more, is needed today.?

“There are others who have risked far more than I,” Adams said. “I would like to think I’ve been given this award to celebrate a happy ending, and to mark an example others should follow in order to keep the American experiment in self-government alive.”

Previous winners of the JFK Profile in Courage Award include U.S. presidents and members of Congress.?

President John F. Kennedy (JFK Presidential Library and Museum)

While John F. Kennedy, then a Democratic U.S. senator from Massachusetts, took a leave of absence from Congress to recover from back surgery, he revisited a topic he had longtime interest in — political courage. That resulted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Profiles in Courage,” which focuses on senators from across the political spectrum overcoming opposition for the greater good.?

The John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award recognizes modern-day public officials who exhibit the spirit that Kennedy admired. More than 80 recipients have been awarded the prize, including heads of state, governors, mayors and members of Congress.?

Previous honorees include:?

Republican President George H.W. Bush?
Democratic President Barack Obama
Republican President Gerald Ford
U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah?
Former Speaker of the House U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-California
Former U.S. Sen. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona
Former U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia
Former U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona

Kentucky activists step in to deliver on the promise of voting rights restoration

Alex Burness — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 09:50:17 +0000

Alonzo Malone, who spent 27 years blocked from voting by the state of Kentucky, is now helping others register to vote. (Photo by Alex Burness)

This story first appeared in Bolts and is reprinted with permission.

Alonzo Malone Jr. says he felt “less than human” during the 27 years the state of Kentucky barred him from voting.

Malone lost his voting rights, along with his freedom and a slew of other civil liberties, in 1989 when he was convicted of a felony in his late 30s and sent to prison for three years. He fell into addiction and homelessness upon release and was sent back to prison in 1998 to serve two more years. After his second release from prison, he filed a petition to regain his voting rights, and as it languished he became active in advocating for the voting rights of others. He’d been sober and free for 16 years when, in 2016, then-Governor Matt Bevin finally restored his right to vote.

“I felt human again,” Malone said when we met in early September at the Lexington Roots & Heritage Festival, a large annual celebration of the city’s Black community, where he circulated through the crowd with a clipboard to register people to vote. “I can remember on Election Day in 2008, Barack Obama being elected. I just felt so discouraged. I could pay the taxes for the salaries of those who were making laws, but I could not cast a vote.”

Until 2019, Kentucky disenfranchised all residents convicted of any felony for life. People who hoped to regain their rights had to seek an expungement — an expensive procedure that only applies to a narrow subset of felony offenses — or they had to directly petition the governor for an individual pardon. These pardons were rarely issued: Bevin restored voting rights for only about 1,500 people during his term in office, among the more than 300,000 in the state who were disenfranchised at the time.

The outlook changed dramatically for Kentuckians with felonies in 2019, when Democrat Andy Beshear entered office with what he called a “moral responsibility” to help others like Malone. Two days after his inauguration, Beshear issued a sweeping executive order to automatically restore voting rights for people convicted in Kentucky of nonviolent crimes once they finish all parts of their sentence, including parole or probation. The order instantly restored voting rights to about 180,000 Kentuckians and sliced the state’s disenfranchised population in half.

But in practice, this massive expansion of voter eligibility has not translated into a wave of newly-enfranchised Kentuckians actually heading to the polls. In the 2022 midterm election, three years on from the executive order, only about 7% of people whose voting rights were restored by Beshear’s order actually cast ballots, according to the Kentucky Civic Engagement Table, a voting rights organization. That’s compared to 42 percent of the overall electorate.

Part of the blame, Kentucky’s advocates say, lies with a Beshear administration that did little to notify people affected by the order. This inaction has inspired Kentuckians like Malone to step in and inform people who are eligible to vote but may not realize it. Their project has kicked into higher gear recently, ahead of a critical November election that, as I reported last month, could lead to a reversal of Beshear’s order and a return to blanket disenfranchisement of anyone convicted of a felony.

A coalition of activists and nonprofit organizations have been using public records and word of mouth to identify people whose rights were restored, traversing the state to tell those people they have the right to vote and to encourage them to exercise it. In addition to door-to-door canvassing, this coalition scours social media, meets people in barber shops and churches, in parks and county jails, and at public events like this Lexington festival.

“I go to the laundromat. I go to the grocery stores,” said Malone, who estimates that he has personally registered more than 500 voters this election cycle alone. He is active with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a statewide nonprofit that favors expansion of voting rights.

He added, “If I’m at the gas station, I always keep voter registrations in my car at any time, and I don’t have a problem pulling them out. I go to car washes. Anywhere I can.”

He and other activists doing this work say they constantly encounter people whose rights were restored by Beshear’s 2019 order but still don’t know it. “It’s a disgrace,” Malone said, that four years later this is still the case.

The Lexington festival is just getting going as the sun sets on a beautiful evening. R&B music blares and fragrant barbecue smoke billows from food trucks while Malone stares out to the growing parade passing by. “There are many Kentuckians who have felonies who are walking around and do not know that their rights are restored. It is my aspiration to talk to everybody here tonight,” Malone said, before heading out into the crowd, clipboard in hand.

On March 4, 2020, a few months after signing the order to restore voting rights, Beshear held a press conference in Frankfort to tout a new online search tool people with felony convictions could use to determine their voting eligibility. This, the governor said, showed he was delivering on one of his top priorities: “Restoring the right to vote to Kentuckians that have done wrong in the past but are doing right now.”

Beshear said during the press conference that his Christian faith teaches him forgiveness, and implored journalists in attendance to help him spread news of the search tool’s launch. “We should welcome those Kentuckians back into our neighborhoods and allow them to fully participate, to recognize that they are full human beings deserving respect,” Beshear said. But his order still excluded about 152,000 Kentuckians who weren’t afforded the same forgiveness after completing felony sentences, largely because they were convicted of violent crimes, according to The Sentencing Project, a national research and advocacy organization.

A reporter at the press conference asked Beshear whether the state would itself take on the task of informing the tens of thousands of people whose rights were restored by his order. “Our job in government is, I believe, to make the opportunity there,” he responded.

Roseileen Fitts, right, cannot vote in Kentucky but spends much of her time encouraging others to participate. (Photo by Alex Burness)

The coalition of formerly incarcerated people and other activists now working to finish the job has tallied more than 89,000 people with felony convictions who had previously been blocked from voting and who have registered since 2019 — nearly 60 percent of those affected by Beshear’s order. They say the state could have helped reach many more people by, say, renting billboard space or placing ads broadcasting the news of Beshear’s restoration order. At the very least, they say Beshear’s administration could have attempteed to reach everyone whose rights were restored at the time of the order.

These coalition members also say it is no surprise that turnout has been so low among Kentuckians who were once barred from voting. “It’s almost like a secret,” said Teresa Forbes-Lopez, who works with Malone and says she was drawn to this activism through her interest in education reform. “The government is not pushing it out. It’s like they want to hold it back. When you let a person out, you should say, ‘Here are all the things you need to do,’ and that’s not happening.”

Beshear declined my request for an interview to talk about rights restoration and the limited impact of his order nearly four years ago. A spokesperson for his Justice and Public Safety Cabinet sent an email highlighting the online search tool that debuted in 2020, and also noting that Kentucky gives people leaving prison a printed “notice of restoration” that contains information on voter eligibility and registration.

Organizers working to ensure people covered by Beshear’s order know of their rights say they’re energized by the activism around rights restoration, but lament that it is so needed.

“So many people tell you, daily, that they don’t know they can register to vote. So many of them are eligible and don’t know,” said Lexington’s Jessica Clark, who got involved in voter outreach through her church. “They are so amazed to know they have their citizenship back, that they can vote.”

“They’re surprised, very surprised,” said Roseileen Fitts of Louisville, who is formerly incarcerated and remains disenfranchised. “Some people don’t even believe you when you tell them.”

Fitts, 32, is a mom, owns a cleaning business, and for years has been a frequent volunteer in Louisville, including mentoring the children of incarcerated parents through the YMCA. Now in recovery from addiction, she’d like to think she’s the sort of person Beshear had in mind when he spoke in 2020 about people “doing right” after previous felony convictions. She is not, of course, as she’ll be reminded next month, when she misses out on yet another election.

We met on the campus of the University of Louisville at an event to direct resources and support to people grappling with substance use disorders. That day alone, Fitts told me, she and her colleagues had met two people unaware their voting rights had been restored by Beshear’s order in 2019. Informing someone that, yes, they can legally vote is bittersweet, she said.

“Our government did nothing to inform people. They didn’t tell anyone. We are doing that. We have a phone list and we go out and find people,” Fitts said. “And we have so much more to do.”

People working to pick up the government’s slack say the Beshear administration could do much more than simple outreach to those it lifted from disenfranchisement.

Bryan Ford, a formerly incarcerated activist who is disenfranchised and runs a nonprofit to assist people in recovery from substance use disorders, said that, for one, probation and parole offices could mention voting more often. This, Ford argues, would have a public-safety benefit, and the data agree with him: research shows that people with past convictions who have their rights restored and engage in voting are less likely to be rearrested.

But as it is, Ford said, “Urinalysis and going to jail — that’s what probation talks to me about. That’s it.”

“You’ll send me a court-appointed lawyer for my plea bargain, but after I do whatever time, who’s going to tell me that one of the things I can do, besides go see my probation officer, is to go get my rights back?”

Bryan Ford, who is blocked from voting in Kentucky, helps pick up trash in the Nicholasville, the Jessamine County seat. (Photo by Alex Burness)

Advocates would be thrilled by even minor reforms. They say the online tool Beshear touted in that press conference, for example, often fails to accurately report whether someone is eligible to vote. Beshear has pledged to be vigilant about keeping the site in order, but many of those using it say it frequently returns false information —telling people who are indeed eligible to vote that they cannot, and vice-versa — and that sometimes it doesn’t function at all.

“We were in a jail yesterday and the link didn’t even work,” said Savvy Shabazz, a formerly incarcerated voting rights activist based in Louisville. “We just have to do the work on our own.”

Shabazz helps lead voter outreach and education efforts in Kentucky jails, where people held before trial often have the right to vote but are still routinely disenfranchised. Shabazz said some people in jails report difficulty getting voter registration forms, while others request mail ballots but never receive them. He said most jails in the state take no proactive steps to identify eligible voters in lockup and provide them ballot access around elections. Shabazz said that many sheriffs, who run local jails, haven’t allowed him and his colleagues inside to do voter outreach ahead of this year’s election.

“Voting is not a privilege; it’s a right,” he adds. “People’s rights are being violated when those jails are not allowing them to vote.”

The struggle to make jail voting easier, like the struggle to spread word of Beshear’s order, reminds Shabazz and other activists that they simply cannot trust the government to do the work of ensuring all eligible voters know of their rights and have ballot access.

Tip Moody, who is formerly incarcerated, says he learned he was allowed to vote again not from the governor’s office or any official government notice, but rather by happening upon a letter submitted by the League of Women Voters that was published in a newspaper. Moody, who now works for a small nonprofit that advocates for and seeks to amplify the voices of formerly incarcerated people, has often encountered people unaware that they are eligible to vote.

He’s also come across plenty of people disinclined to participate at all, even when aware they are able. “You would be amazed at how many are eligible but don’t want to register,” he said. That’s common in the U.S., where interaction with the criminal justice system is often predictive of turnout. A series of studies released in the past 15 years found participation ranging from 5% to 18% among people recently released from prison who have the right to vote. In February, Bolts reported on new research showing that simply being pulled over by a traffic cop was enough to make people in Florida less likely to vote.

Explained Marcus Jackson, who works with Moody and was imprisoned for 17 years, “The only time a lot of people, especially disenfranchised people, see politicians is during election cycles. We want people to understand why the vote is important, why they should show up at the polls, but we just haven’t had that type of investment in a lot of our communities.”

Marcus Jackson, left, is still barred from voting, while Tip Moody, right, has regained his voting rights. (Photo by Alex Burness)

I met Moody and Jackson at a park in Nicholasville in September. They and about 15 other men, all with past felony convictions, had come to Lake Mingo Park to pick up trash and show face in their community — a way, they said, to remind passersby and themselves that they are worthy, valuable people, whether or not the government lets them vote.

“I still can’t vote, and it’s hurtful,” said Jackson, who lives in Frankfort. “Not everyone is going to be as persistent to consistently show up like this, but I’m highly motivated to be that example, so that they will allow people like me to vote.”

Many other people working in this space echoed Jackson and Moody in saying that feelings of democratic detachment or abandonment are most evident in poorer and often predominantly-Black sections of the state. Disenfranchisement, after all, falls hardest on Black Kentuckians, who are more than twice as likely to be blocked from voting, according to a recent report by the League of Women Voters of Kentucky. As of 2016, one in four Black people of voting age in Kentucky could not vote; at nearly one in eight today, the rate is still alarmingly high compared to the rest of the country.

The longstanding and broad exclusion levied so strongly against Black people in Kentucky leaves many feeling sidelined from a young age, activists said. Voting rights activists working to register people restored by Beshear sometimes visit local schools to pre-register teenagers on the cusp of voting age. They told me that the kids in poorer, more heavily-incarcerated areas tend to feel alienated from democracy in much the same way Jackson and Moody so often observe among adults with past felonies.

“Lexington Catholic — that’s where the rich kids are, and when I set my table up, they come up to register to vote like I’m giving something away,” Clark said. “At the public schools, I have to work the crowd. I have to be in their face to say, ‘Can I register you to vote?’ And they say, ‘maybe next time, or ‘I’ll think about it.’ I have to beg them: ‘Please let me register you to vote. Your vote is your voice.’”

Regina Harris, who works with Clark on voter outreach in schools, says she tries to talk about disenfranchisement and rights restoration when meeting students, but that those in wealthier areas typically avoid the topic. “What I do notice with the Catholic schools and the private schools,” Harris said, “is that the kids there want nothing to do with me when I talk to them about restoration of rights for felons. Their parents will literally move them aside.”

It might not seem like it, Jackson said when I met him at Lake Mingo Park, but the effort to get Black teenagers in underinvested, overpoliced areas to exercise their power as voters aligns closely with the work he’s doing to get his peers to see value in spending a morning hunting for litter in the suburbs. At 51, Jackson said, he’s learned that government officials aren’t likely to take up the project of empowering and mobilizing people excluded either formally or informally from democracy.

“My whole life, as a little Black boy, I always had to prove myself. No one accepted me on face value. It was always a stereotype or something that came along with me —t he Black kid coming into the store to steal. That happened very early on in life.”

“It’s always been that ‘you’re not good enough.’ And once you get that felony conviction,” Jackson said, miming the swing of a baseball bat, “it’s ‘off with your head.’”

U.S. Supreme Court rules Alabama’s congressional maps violate Voting Rights Act

Brian Lyman — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 15:49:09 +0000

Bobby Singleton, the Alabama Senate minority leader and a plaintiff in the case, said Thursday he was “surprised” by the ruling but said it was the “right thing to do.” (Photo by Stew Milne)

The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday upheld a lower court ruling that Alabama’s 2022 congressional maps violated the Voting Rights Act, a ruling that preserves a major part of the law and could lead to new congressional maps in Alabama.

A three-judge panel in January 2022 ruled that maps approved by the Alabama Legislature in 2021 that had a single majority-Black congressional district violated Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate based on race, color or membership in certain language groups.

Plaintiffs in the case argued the approach packed Black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, into a single district and made it difficult for those outside the district to elect leaders of their choosing or participate meaningfully in the political process.

The lower court ordered the state to develop a remedy that included a second district with a significant Black population.

Alabama appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Alabama’s approach to redistricting, which it called “race-neutral,” matched the text of the law. The state argued that it generated millions of potential maps without referencing race, and could glean from that a median number of majority-minority districts.

In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected the state’s argument, as well as arguments from the state that Section 2 did not apply to single-member districts, writing that the state “misunderstands (Section) 2 and our decisions implementing it.”

“A district is not equally open … when minority voters face—unlike their majority peers—bloc voting along racial lines, arising against the backdrop of substantial racial discrimination within the State, that renders a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter,” Roberts wrote.

Bobby Singleton, the Alabama Senate Minority Leader and a plaintiff in the case, said in a phone interview Thursday he was “surprised” by the ruling but said it was the “right thing to do.”

“The African-American community is grossly underrepresented in Congress,” Singleton said. “This is something that is quite a victory today.”

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement Thursday that the decision was “disappointing,” but “this case is not over.”

A message seeking comment was left with Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who helped lead redistricting efforts in the Alabama Legislature in 2021.

Gina Maiola, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kay Ivey, said in a statement Thursday her office was “reviewing the outcome.”

Abha Khanna, who argued the case for the plaintiffs before the U.S. Supreme Court, said in a statement that the Supreme Court “made the right decision today.”

“Alabama’s current congressional map systematically dilutes the voting power of Black Alabamians, in clear violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act,” the statement said. “Thankfully, the Court today identified Alabama’s redistricting scheme as a textbook violation of the landmark civil rights law.”

The plaintiffs in the case Thursday released a joint statement through their attorneys that said the Alabama lawmakers had tried to “shirk their responsibility to ensure communities of color are given an equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.”

“Today, the Supreme Court reminded them of that responsibility by affirming the district court’s order that a new map be drawn that complies with federal law – one that recognizes the diversity in our state rather than erasing it,” the statement said. “This fight was won through generations of Black leaders who refused to be silent, and while much work is left, today we can move forward with these reaffirmed protections civil rights leaders fought and died for.”

Alabama has had a single majority-minority congressional district, taking in most of the western Black Belt in the state, since 1992. It is represented by U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, the only Democrat in Alabama’s seven-member U.S. House delegation.

Plaintiffs argued that a House delegation that was 14% Black meant Black Alabamians, who make up 26.8% of the state population, were underrepresented.

During the lower court hearing, plaintiffs proposed creating two new congressional districts that would be 41% to 50% Black.

Bernard Simelton, the president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, said in an interview Thursday that the decision was the biggest since 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder. That ruling struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required the U.S. Department of Justice to review changes to voting laws in states with a history of discrimination, like Alabama.

“For Black voters, this means that your voice is still important,” he said. “And that if we continue to work to get more voters out, we will be able to elect more people to positions of our choice.”

In a dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the question was whether the state had to draw districts proportional to the Black share of the population.

“Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it,” he wrote.

Roberts wrote that the court was only reaffirming prior precedents.

“The concern that Section 2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new,” Roberts wrote. “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.”

Ralph Chapoco and Alander Rocha contributed to this report.

Updated at 11:08 a.m. with comments from Gov. Kay Ivey’s office and plaintiffs in the case, and to correct spelling of Abha Khanna’s name; at 12:05 p.m. with comment from the Alabama attorney general’s office and at 1:11 p.m. with comments from Bernard Simelton of the NAACP; and at 11:43 a.m. Friday to correct percentage of Black residents in Alabama from 26% to 26.8% and the proposed congressional district make up by plaintiffs from 41% to 45% to 41% to 50%

Kentucky’s primary election is Tuesday. Here’s what you need to know before you go to the polls

McKenna Horsley — Mon, 15 May 2023 09:10:10 +0000

The Kentucky Senate on Tuesday approved a bill ending one form of voter identification. (Getty Images)

The primary election in Kentucky is Tuesday, May 16. Statewide, voters will choose party nominees for the general election.?

On Tuesday polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. local time. Kentucky is split between Eastern and Central Daylight time zones.?

Most voters’ ballots will only have elections for constitutional officers: governor,?attorney general, secretary of state, agriculture commissioner, treasurer and auditor.?

No one has officially filed for the office of lieutenant governor as Kentucky gubernatorial candidates must select a running mate to join their ticket. Those selections must be made by the second Tuesday in August.?

A state Senate seat will be decided by voters in Bath, Clark, Menifee, Montgomery and part of Fayette counties. The special election, which has three candidates, will fill an unexpired term in District 28. The seat became open after Dr. Ralph Alvarado, a Republican, became Tennessee’s health commissioner.?

Any voter who is in line by 6 p.m. will be allowed to cast a ballot. Kentucky does not have same-day registration. But if you registered to vote 29 days before the election and your name is not on the precinct roster, you may request a provisional ballot.

Proof of identification is required to vote in Kentucky. Accepted forms are a drivers license, college ID, military ID or another ID issued by the state or a county or city that has the voter’s name and photograph. More details about voters’ rights can be found on the State Board of Elections website.

Mail-in absentee ballots must be received by the local county clerk before 6 p.m. on Election Day.?

Voters may report suspected election law violations and voting irregularities to the Attorney General’s Office via its Election Fraud Hotline. The hotline will be staffed on Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. The number is 1-800-328-VOTE, or 1-800-328-8683.?The number of complaints logged by the hotline will be posted on the office’s website.?

For details about your local polling place, including an address, visit the State Board of Elections website and select your county. More information can be found at govote.ky.gov.?

Live election results will be available online from the State Board of Elections.?

To view a sample ballot, visit the Secretary of State’s website.

Trump ‘White House in waiting’ helped develop Ohio voting bill touted as model for states

Zachary Roth — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 18:43:02 +0000

(Getty Images)

A new bill announced by Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose to standardize and modernize state voting records is being welcomed by election administrators and some voter advocates, who say it could increase transparency and confidence in elections.

But the first-of-its-kind legislation was developed with help from a think tank that is leading the charge nationally for more restrictive voting rules and has been called a “White House in waiting” for a second Trump administration. The bill also is winning praise from conservative activists who have spread fear about illegal voting as part of an effort to pressure election officials to more aggressively purge voter rolls.

The measure, known as the Data Analysis Transparency Archive (DATA) Act, could offer a glimpse of a future conservative agenda on voting issues. At a Feb. 22 press conference announcing the bill, LaRose, a Republican, thanked the America First Policy Institute for “helping with the development” of the legislation. AFPI reportedly aims to create a policy platform for former President Donald Trump.

A spokesman for LaRose did not respond to an inquiry about AFPI’s role in developing the bill. But Hilton Beckham, AFPI’s director of communications, said via email that the group did not write the bill. Beckham said it came out of an AFPI report released last year, which found that many local election offices are failing to retain election data as required by law, and that in many counties, the total number of ballots cast doesn’t match up with the total number of registered voters who cast ballots.

“Being able to analyze election results in real-time will help find out why this is happening immediately,” Beckham added, “potentially catching unlawful activity, and eliminating distrust and conspiracy (theories) from voters caused by sloppy record keeping.”

The AFPI report notes near the end that, after reviewing AFPI’s findings, LaRose “spearheaded a national effort” to urge states to pass laws ensuring voter data is preserved.

Now, the two are teaming up to spread the word. On March 4, LaRose promoted the DATA Act alongside Hogan Gidley, a former Trump campaign spokesman who helps run AFPI’s elections policy arm, on an elections panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major confab for GOP activists and officials.

And in late February, LaRose tweeted a picture of himself meeting with members of Congress’ “election integrity caucus” in Washington, D.C., “to share the Ohio model.” The caucus was founded by Rep. Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican who appeared on an AFPI voting panel in July, and who has said of the 2020 election: “We don’t know if it was stolen or not.”

These collaborations with election deniers and other backers of restrictive voting rules raise the question: Is LaRose’s bill a wonky and bipartisan measure — “something that should be embraced by both Republicans and Democrats,” as he put it at the Ohio press conference — that has the potential to make genuine improvements to how election officials maintain and publish voting records? Or could it help advance the agenda of national Republicans working to lay the groundwork for new voting restrictions by stoking fear about fraud?

Or both?

A ‘gold standard’ for states

At the Ohio press conference announcing the bill, LaRose noted that he’s also spoken to other secretaries of state around the country. “They are interested in bringing this model to their states,” he said. “So something that’s starting here in Ohio could end up becoming the gold standard, again, for what other states want to do.”

The DATA Act would create standard definitions of key election data — for instance, how many people are registered, and how many voted on each day and by what method — for use by Ohio’s 88 county election offices; clarify what data the counties must retain and for how long; and set up an automated process for the state to collect the data.

A central agency within the secretary of state’s office would act as a clearinghouse, publishing easily accessible election data online, before, during, and after elections.

The result, backers say, would be to make it much easier for Ohioans — including those concerned about illegal voting, which remains extremely rare — to compare voting records across counties, and to ensure that both county-level and statewide numbers add up.

“When people look behind the curtain, what they’re going to see is how well-run our elections are,” LaRose said at the press conference. “The current lack of transparency in some ways breeds those conspiracy theories that are often not based in reality.”

But LaRose’s record on voting issues isn’t helping to reassure those raising concerns about the bill. He said in an interview at CPAC he is “actively” considering a U.S. Senate run, and he has been accused of inconsistency as he has tried to appeal both to conservative Republicans worried about fraud and to more moderate voters.

LaRose has often said that Ohio’s elections are secure, and when asked about 2020, he said: “I don’t believe it was stolen” (though he added: “I do believe that bad things happen that should not have happened”). But last year, he tweeted an attack on the “mainstream media” for “trying to minimize voter fraud” in the state. The idea that “there’s nothing to see here,” he added, is “WRONG.”

LaRose privately called Ohio’s state legislative maps, which were challenged as a pro-GOP gerrymander, “asinine,” not long before voting for them as a member of the state’s redistricting commission.

And on March 6, the same day three Republican-led states announced they were leaving the Electronic Registration Information Center, a well-regarded interstate system for sharing voter registration data, LaRose told ERIC in a letter that he was considering pulling Ohio out as well. A few weeks earlier, LaRose had expressed confidence in ERIC.

A ‘clunky’ system?

Ohio’s election administrators say streamlining the current low-tech process for counties to report election data to the state is badly needed.

For example, explained Aaron Ockerman, a lobbyist for the Ohio Association of Election Officials, during the state’s four-week early-voting period, the secretary of state sends out a survey asking the counties for voting data, including how many people voted in person each day, and how many absentee ballots were received. The counties respond by putting the numbers into an email and sending it.

“It’s clunky,” said Ockerman. “If there’s a way they can automate that process, that would make our lives easier and their lives easier.”

It can help voter advocates, too. Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said her group has been calling for uniform data tracking and reporting making it easier to identify places where voters are facing access problems. Right now, she said, each county defines and reports the data in slightly different ways.

“We (currently) cannot compare election operations in one county to another cleanly,” Miller said. “We’re looking at apples and oranges.”

Miller said the LWV of Ohio hasn’t yet taken a formal position on the bill, but called it a “positive move.”

But Collin Marozzi, the deputy policy director for the ACLU of Ohio, said that while his organization, too, likes the bill’s data transparency provisions, AFPI’s involvement raises concerns.

“I’m disappointed that Ohio would entertain a pretty significant change to election law and registration records retention from such an openly partisan organization, and one that has affiliated itself with a former president who has consistently put forward bogus election fraud claims,” said Marozzi. “I’m not saying that on its face it’s a negative. But it’s having a hard time passing the smell test right now.”

Trump ‘White House in waiting’

Founded by a former Trump White House policy adviser, AFPI has signed up big-name Trump allies like former White House advisers Larry Kudlow and Kellyanne Conway, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump’s first trip back to Washington, D.C., after leaving office was to deliver the keynote address at AFPI’s America First Agenda Summit last July. Trump hosted a black-tie fundraiser for AFPI at Mar-a-Lago in 2021, and his PAC has donated $1 million to the group, according to Politico, which has reported that AFPI is often described as a “White House in waiting” for the former president.

AFPI has been a consistent advocate for stricter voting rules.

A 25-point AFPI policy document on elections lists almost every key priority of the “election integrity” movement, including requiring photo ID, restricting who can vote absentee, eliminating drop boxes, and banning the counting of ballots that arrive after election day.

The leadership of AFPI’s elections policy arm, the Center for Election Integrity, appears well-suited to this agenda. Gidley, the former Trump campaign spokesman who serves as CEI’s vice chair and top communications official, in 2020 warned about the potential for “massive fraud” from mail-in voting.

“It’s getting more difficult in this country to elect (supporters of strict voting rules) if we have countless examples of irregularities, illegalities, anomalies, and yes, fraud, in our election system,” Gidley declared at the CPAC panel with LaRose on March 4.

As Ohio Secretary of State, CEI chair Ken Blackwell made a string of decisions that restricted access to voting, especially for Democratic-leaning groups, in the 2004 presidential election’s pivotal state, while also serving as an Ohio co-chair of President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.

Blackwell “saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters,” then-Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat who led a congressional probe of the fiasco, has said.

Blackwell later served as a member of Trump’s voter fraud commission, which was disbanded without finding evidence of widespread voter fraud, after being sued by one Democratic commissioner who accused it of showing “troubling bias.”

The 2022 AFPI report that played a role in the DATA Act’s conception cites a 1960 federal law requiring the retention of election records. AFPI researchers made public records requests for voter data from the 100 most-populated counties in 14 swing states, including Ohio, and found that very few had the actual voter files from the 2020 election.

“This critical record-keeping shortcoming reduces election integrity and restricts researchers from doing a proper analysis post-election and to identify registration and voting discrepancies,” the report noted.

At the Feb. 22 press conference, LaRose echoed AFPI in referencing the 1960 law — which in fact was a civil rights measure aimed at making it harder for local election officials and citizens to keep minority voters off the rolls — to argue that counties are legally required to retain data.

Conservative activists pleased

Another group cheering the Ohio bill is the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group of conservative legal activists that has frequently sued election officials for not purging voters from the rolls aggressively enough. PILF’s executive director and founder, J. Christian Adams, a veteran election lawyer, served on Trump’s voter fraud commission alongside Blackwell.

“This is exactly the best practices that the Public Interest Legal Foundation encourages states to adopt that make post election auditing easier,” Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the group, said via email, adding that the bill will allow Ohioans “to hold their election officials accountable.”

PILF has drawn criticism for using misleading data in some of its efforts to raise concerns about illegal voting. In 2019, it was forced to issue an apology to a group of Virginia voters who sued for defamation after a PILF report, “Aliens Invasion,” alleging large-scale illegal voting in the state, wrongly described them as non-citizens. The report included the voters’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and, in some cases, Social Security numbers.

In the current climate of heightened partisan tensions over voting, some voter advocates worry that by giving self-appointed fraud watchdogs more material to work with, the DATA Act could make it easier for them to issue sweeping challenges to large numbers of voters — or even to election results — on flimsy evidence, or to pressure election officials to more aggressively pare the rolls.

Other Republican-run states and conservative activists have recently sought to encourage voter challenges.

In the lead up to Georgia’s 2021 U.S. Senate runoff elections, which would determine Senate control, the activist group True the Vote challenged 364,000 Georgia voters, drawing a voter intimidation lawsuit. Months later, the state passed a sweeping voting law that empowered individual people to make an unlimited number of voter challenges.

Both PILF and True the Vote recently launched their own interactive databases aimed at allowing users to find inaccuracies in state voter rolls.

Kayla Griffin, the Ohio director for the voter access group All Voting Is Local, said

that in addition to concerns about individual voter challenges, her group also worries that requiring election offices to produce voter data immediately after election day could lead to interference with the certification process, in which results are confirmed and declared official.

In recent years, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico all have seen efforts by GOP activists or officials to block or delay certification of local or statewide results — in the Michigan case, the outcome of the state’s 2020 presidential election were at issue — based on unfounded claims about irregularities. Though none have succeeded in subverting results, they have stoked further distrust in elections.

“We want those ballots to be protected, and we want certification to go off smoothly, without public pressure to cave and not certify an election,” said Griffin. “So there needs to be some guardrails around that as well.”

Details pose questions

Buried in the DATA Act’s fine print are details that exacerbate some worries.

The bill requires local election offices to send the state a list of registered voters each day, starting 45 days before an election and ending 81 days after. Why 81 days? Marozzi, of the ACLU, said that’s how long the counties have by law to change their final canvass of results — something, Marozzi said, that “adds to our concerns.”

David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and a leading expert on election administration, said he sees “a lot of good things” in the bill’s transparency and record-keeping provisions, but flagged another little-noticed danger: While some other states’ laws requiring public disclosure of voter data withhold voters’ birthdates, the Ohio bill doesn’t.

That’s not only a privacy concern, said Becker. Studies have found that efforts to use birthdates to identify people voting illegally have often generated false positives, because it’s not rare for different people to have the same first name, last name, and birthdate. That means the data made accessible by the Ohio bill could lend itself to being misused by anti-fraud activists, who often have more zeal than data expertise.

“Any match based on first name, last name and birthdate is a bad one,” said Becker.

Details aside, LaRose argued at the press conference that the DATA Act is needed to restore faith in elections, which he said has been badly damaged in part by false claims about fraud.

“There is a crisis of confidence — that’s not hyperbole,” LaRose said.

But Griffin expressed frustration that Ohio’s decision-makers have rushed to draft measures that respond to false public perceptions — she cited both the DATA Act and Ohio’s controversial new voter ID law — while often ignoring concrete problems of access, including a lack of drop boxes and early-voting locations in many counties, that her group has long been raising the alarm about.

“We have pushed through bills quickly off of perception,” Griffin said. “But we have been telling you for years of the actual things that are broken in our election system.”

More than 160,000 Kentuckians still cannot vote because of felony convictions

McKenna Horsley — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 20:51:54 +0000

The Kentucky Senate on Tuesday approved a bill ending one form of voter identification. (Getty Images)

FRANKFORT — A voting rights group wants Kentuckians to decide on a constitutional amendment that would automatically restore the vote to convicted felons who have completed their sentences — a change that a recent poll found has strong public support.

The League of Women Voters of Kentucky on Tuesday voiced support for Senate Bill 164, sponsored by Sen. Brandon Storm, R-London.

Sen. Brandon Storm

Introduced last week, the bill would let voters decide on a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to persons convicted of felonies once they complete their sentences and restoring other civil rights three years after completion. The felonies could not have involved treason, election fraud or bribery in elections.?

Cindy Heine, the League’s legislative liaison, said the group thinks Storm’s bill would restore the vote to most of the 161,506 Kentuckians who are still permanently disenfranchised. The only paths to regaining the vote now are a pardon by the governor or expungement of a conviction, both burdensome processes.

Kentucky still has one of the nation’s highest rates of citizens barred from voting by a felony conviction, despite Gov. Andy Beshear’s 2019 order restoring rights to those convicted of a nonviolent felony, according to a League report?released Tuesday.?

It is “long past time for Kentuckians to be permitted to vote on a constitutional amendment to determine whether the permanent ban on voting should be lifted,” the nonpartisan group says.

The League commissioned a statewide Mason-Dixon poll last month that found 68% of Kentucky voters support automatic restoration of voting rights after completing a sentence, while 24% oppose it.

Rep. Keturah Herron (Kentucky Lantern photo by McKenna Horsley)

It’s about “dignity, humanity”

The League also supports? House Bill 97, introduced by Rep. Keturah Herron, D-Louisville. Herron’s proposed amendment is similar to Storm’s except it would restore civil rights after five years.?

As the League released the latest in its series of voting rights reports, Herron underscored the importance of the right to vote.

“I believe that having voting rights restored — it’s about dignity, it’s about humanity and it’s about letting people know that we see you and we want to hear you,” the representative said.?

The League reports that 4.54% of Kentuckians have been barred from voting, seventh-highest in the nation, compared to a national disenfranchisement rate of 1.99%.

More than one in 10 Black Kentuckians have lost the right to vote, or? 11.47% of the voting-age population, almost double the national rate of 5.28%. That’s the eighth-highest among states.?Of the 257,551 voting eligible African Americans in Kentucky, 29,533 are banned from voting.?

Latino Kentuckians, with a voting eligible population of 62,040, are disenfranchised at a rate of 4.06% (2,516), the sixth-highest nationally. The average national rate for Latino Americans is 1.7%.

Alaina Sweasy, who was granted a partial pardon by Gov. Matt Bevin, said when she went to the polls to vote, she was asked for paperwork in addition to her ID by a poll worker. She felt ashamed after the interaction. Currently, Sweasy is a social worker and lobbyist.?

“I’m more than the worst thing that I’ve ever done,” Sweasy said. “It should not be this hard to participate in the democratic process. And we will not stop until we are whole human beings.”

Marcus Jackson said he was not covered under Gov. Andy Beshear’s 2019 executive order restoring voting rights to more than 140,000 Kentuckians with non-violent felony convictions because of a 1992 conviction for a crime that he said he did not commit. Since then, he has gone on to work with the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky and advocates for restoring voting rights.?

He added that he was inspired by the work of other advocates. To those who are serving their sentences, he said: “There are people still willing to give you a chance. You are more than that mistake that you made.”

Kentucky out of step with other states

Kentucky is one of three states that permanently bars anyone with a felony conviction from voting. The other states are Iowa and Virginia. The national trend is to restore voting rights automatically, especially for those who have completed their sentences, according to the League report.

The League has released reports on voting rights of convicted felons in the commonwealth since 2006.?

Some bills have been introduced in the General Assembly to work toward restoring voting rights since 2020. During the last legislative session, three bills that would have put a constitutional amendment on the ballot did not receive a hearing, the League said.?

Kentucky’s 1891 Constitution permanently bans citizens from voting if convicted of a felon. The League report says that the only way to currently restore voting rights is by an executive pardon or expungement, which can be difficult and expensive.?

On his third day in office, Beshear issued an executive order restoring voting rights to more than 140,000 Kentuckians who completed sentences for nonviolent offenses.?

“The civil rights of thousands of Kentuckians are still left outside the scope of these requirements and remain unaffected by the new policy,” the League’s report said.?

“Studies show that restoring voting rights reduces rates of recidivism, or re-offending, meaning that our communities are safer with restoration of rights,” the report adds.

?“In addition, the costs of re-offending (arrests, courts, prison) are avoided. Studies also demonstrate expungement leads to increased employment and income. Supports for reintegrating into society, by restoring voting rights and expungement of records, are important factors for Kentucky’s future.”

Here’s what the League recommends:?

Place a constitutional amendment on the ballot allowing Kentuckians to decide whether voting rights should be automatically restored.
Create a coordinated government effort that fully implements Executive Order 2019-003 restoring the right to vote, including a robust public education campaign to inform, promote, assist and provide resources in the restoration process.
Release figures annually on the number of voting rights applications filed and the number approved.
Provide statements of the reasons for the governor’s decisions on individual applications for reinstatement of voting rights.
Eliminate the $50 filing fee and the $250 application fee for felony expungement.

The full report can be found online.?