Bluegrass Times

Recently enacted election reform legislation in Kentucky that increases the ability of local election officials to maintain clean voter rolls may have been undermined by federal election reform legislation, S.1, which failed to pass U.S. Senate.

Senate Democrats took up the legislation up on Tuesday, June 22 but lacked the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster to begin a floor debate on the measure, as all Republican senators voted against the bill.

If enacted, the S.1 would have overridden many state election law provisions, effectively reducing some states of their constitutionally derived authority to establish election procedures. That includes the provision in the new Kentucky law, contained in House Bill 574 signed Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, in early April, which enhances the ability of local election officials to remove non-residents from the voter rolls and clean up other inaccuracies.

The Kentucky law is rare among states in that it won the strong support of both Republicans and Democrats in the legislature.

“While other states are caught up in the partisan division, Kentucky is leading the nation in making it both easier to vote and harder to cheat,” Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, told Spectrum News 1 in a recent interview. “House Bill 574 is a once-a-century reform that we were long overdue for, and I've really tried to use this office in a way others haven’t.”

The Honest Elections Project says that accurate voter rolls are vital for honest elections, but as of December 2019 more than 200 counties in the country had more registered voters than citizens eligible to vote. However, in many cases, “inactive voters” are included in statistics as registered voters due to administrative or other factors, such as citizens moving without leaving forwarding address information.

Moreover, 77% of Americans support up to date maintenance of voter rolls, according to a 2018 poll.

Other election reform provisions in Kentucky’s law include the establishment of three days of early in-person voting, including a Saturday, with no excuse required, a transition to toward universal paper ballots, and the keeping of an online voter portal making absentee balloting fully transparent for voters and election officials.