People vote in the Halifax Volunteer Fire Department in Allen County on Election. Day, Nov. 5, 2024. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Austin Anthony)
Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams said he was “95% pleased” with how Kentucky’s voting process panned out during the 2024 general election.
In a Wednesday afternoon telephone interview, Adams discussed voting experiences at polling locations, possible updates to election regulations and the state’s voter turnout.
According to unofficial results, more than 3.5 million registered Kentucky voters cast their ballots this election. While some counties were still counting write-in candidates as of Wednesday afternoon, turnout appeared to hover around 59%. Adams suspected that number will slightly increase as counting is completed.
Early voting was temporarily established in Kentucky in 2020 amid health concerns during the coronavirus pandemic and included expanded allowances for absentee voting as well as Kentucky’s first early voting days. Adams and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear teamed up to back the proposal. The General Assembly made early voting — but fewer days of it — permanent in 2021.
“I think it was a little beneath what I expected,” Adams said of overall turnout this year. “On the other hand, I’m pleased that we voted as many voters in four days as we voted in three weeks four years ago, and it went smoothly. That wasn’t a given. This has been a hard election to prepare for, just because you’ve got so many people who haven’t voted in a while, you have so much misinformation floating around. You have fewer days to vote than you had. You’re going to have less utilization of absentee than we had last time. I just didn’t have the same tools in my toolbox, so I’ve always been more concerned. I’m glad it went so well.”
Presidential elections tend to be harder to pull off, as turnout is often four times higher than a typical primary or twice as high as in a non-presidential general election. Other differences include having more polling locations and more poll workers.
Adams also said that about a third of voters in a presidential election haven’t voted since the last one, if they’ve ever voted before at all.
“You just have a lot of new people to the process who have not been paying attention to the government for years and don’t know what has changed, don’t know their voting location may have changed, they don’t know that there’s different days. They don’t know much. They’ve not followed the government. So it’s really, really challenging. I’m very pleased at how smooth it went.”
In the 2020 general election, Kentucky voter turnout was about 60%.
Early voting cleared Election Day lines
For most Kentucky counties, voting was a smooth process on Tuesday. Adams said his plea to Kentuckians to vote early was a smart move.. About a third of this year’s turnout cast ballots before Tuesday.
Adams said he heard anecdotally that voting was easy on Tuesday in Fayette County, Kentucky’s second largest county and where some lines were expected at the polls. He attributed that to early voting.
“In 2020, we had a million voters vote early, and that made Election Day a lot smoother,” Adams said. “And I didn’t think that we’d get that many this time — we got about two thirds that many — but even that many voting outside of Tuesday smoothed out the turnout for Tuesday.”
Plus, voters and poll workers had pressure relieved. Adams said he was “chewing my nails that we have people lose their tempers” but “tempers were chill, people were polite” across the state. Issues arose in other states where fights broke out over voters wearing campaign gear and bomb threats were called into polling locations.
According to numbers Adams shared online ahead of Election Day, 656,277 Kentuckians cast ballots during no-excuse early voting, which is held for three days the week before the election. Most were registered Republican, or 52.6%. Meanwhile, 40.3% were registered Democrats and 7.1% were registered as Independent or other.
Adams said the large turnout of Republicans makes support for early voting more politically secure. “The fact that Republicans dominated it makes it, I think, less likely that the legislature will repeal it,” Adams said. “The fact that it was so popular and that it was Republicans who dominated it suggests to me that they’ll leave their own voters alone, and stop trying to take away their voting rights.”
Earlier this year, a Senate bill to repeal early voting died in a committee. The sponsor of the bill, Sen. John Schickel, R-Union, did not seek reelection.
Adams said he believes early voting policies will live on past his time in the secretary of state’s office. Adams is serving in his second term and statewide officers are term-limited.
Adams also predicted that over time, more people will vote early, especially if counties increase early voting locations. He encouraged counties to have more than one early voting location this general election.
Adams said he has not had a chance to discuss an early voting expansion with lawmakers, but said it was “too soon” after the election to say. It’s also a matter of if county clerks will go along with it and if funding is available.
Adams said Kentucky needs to raise base funding for future elections before 2026. No elections are on the ballot in Kentucky next year.
Earlier this year, the state Senate nixed $13 million proposed to help counties raise poll worker pay and rent more spaces for polling sites. The $13 million across three years was originally part of House Bill 580, a large elections bill that became law.
Adams said funding for elections has gotten better in recent years. He was a member of the State Board of Elections in 2016 when it had to vote to provide less money for elections than what was required in state law. Since then, millions of dollars have gone to upgrading voter equipment to transition to paper ballots and optical scanners as well as buying e-poll books.
Adams said the General Assembly might want to change state laws around the candidate filing process. This election cycle, Louisville Democratic Rep. Nima Kulkarni had to fight a legal battle to appear on the ballot after her candidacy paperwork was challenged in court.
“There’s enough little things on the periphery they might want to talk about that we could actually get some real traction on a bigger package,” Adams said.
Voting issues in Jefferson County
Judge denies emergency request to keep Louisville polls open an additional 2 hours
An e-poll book issue in Jefferson County sparked a Democratic-backed lawsuit to extend voting hours on Tuesday because of the long waits and lines at the polls earlier in the day. A judge denied that request.
Adams said from what he was told “it looks like it simply was an error on the part of the office to not require that the e-poll books be turned on early enough to be able to process what they needed to process, which is to say, a ton of information, because we had a lot of voters in our biggest county vote early.”
Poll workers use e-poll books to electronically find a voter’s information before they are given a ballot. With large turnout for early voting, the e-poll books are key to quickly making sure someone does not vote twice. Adams said it took from 6 a.m. to 9:15 a.m. to get the issue resolved, which was “a quarter of the voting day.”
“I’m not going to be able to get every clerk, to get every poll worker to do a certain thing,” Adams said. “We have 15,000 poll workers, but what we can do is we can put something in the state law, or maybe we can issue regulation of looking at that too, but we need some sort of legal directive that requires the county clerks to either keep these running or to power them up with sufficient time. And then we can tell them how much time that is. We need some kind of window in there where these things are already booted up and they can do what they have to do before 6 a.m.”
Recanvass?
As of Wednesday afternoon, Adams had not received any recanvass requests, and said he did not expect to. The deadline to request is Thursday, Nov. 14, or nine days after the general election. Three House races qualified for a recanvass, including one with an automatic recount, the 67th House District. There, Democrat Matthew Lehman is leading Republican Terry Hatton by 30 votes.
The remaining two races are the 88th House District held by Democratic Rep. Cherlynn Stevenson, who has conceded to Republican Vanessa Grossl, and the 45th House District, where Democrat Adam Moore narrowly defeated Republican Thomas Jefferson.
