Bluegrass Times

News that the Kentucky of secretary of state has removed more names than it added to its voter rolls for the sixth month this year is a correction that’s a long time in coming, according to J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which has filed numerous lawsuits against state election officials over allegations of not maintaining voter rolls.

“It’s no surprise that they are finally doing this,” Adams told the Blue Grass Times. “Deadwood on Kentucky’s voter rolls goes all the way back to the early 2000s.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is a based in Indiana. It has filed several suits against states and local governments to purge voters from election rolls.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams recently announced that 6,968 new voters registered with the state in October, but 7,146 were removed. This included the names of 5,908 deceased voters, and 873 felony convicts. Others removed from the rolls include 314 who moved out of state, 26 who voluntarily de-registered and 24 who were adjudged incompetent. There was also one duplicate registration.

“Ensuring election integrity is a daily process,” Adams, a Republican, said in a statement.  “Through vigilance and diligence, we are cleaning up the mess I inherited when I was sworn in last year.”

Back in March, Kentucky became a rarity among states when the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a bipartisan election initiative, and Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, signed the bill into law.

The law includes provisions that enhance the ability of local election officials to remove non-residents from the voter rolls and clean up other inaccuracies.

The new law also bans ballot harvesting, the collection of mail ballots by third parties, and includes 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.

According to Adams’ office, Democratic registration in the state has dropped by 3,225 in a state with with1,637,006 registered Democratic voters. Republican registrants increased by 2,117 to total 1,582,317 voters, or 44.4% of the electorate.