Kentuckians resist federal election overreach

While attempts to push the SAVE Act through Congress are stalling in the Senate (for now), var­i­ous parts of the act are being pushed through oth­er means, and Kentucky is not immune to the effects.

During his sec­ond term, Trump has issued two exec­u­tive orders that deal with vot­ing. Though slight­ly dif­fer­ent in scope, both imple­ment sec­tions of the SAVE Act seek­ing to move pow­er over elec­tions away from the states and to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. And both seek to com­pile a fed­er­al vot­er reg­istry con­sist­ing of pri­vate infor­ma­tion, includ­ing license num­bers and par­tial or full social secu­ri­ty num­bers (see Part II for more details). 

Both of these exec­u­tive orders have been chal­lenged, and both were ruled uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, but are being appealed. More recent­ly, the Department of Justice has now sued 30 states (includ­ing Kentucky) in an effort to gain access to the vot­er rolls of cit­i­zens. While 10 of these suits have been dis­missed, the law­suit in Kentucky is still ongo­ing. These attempts by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment to inter­fere in Kentucky elec­tions should alarm us for three pri­ma­ry reasons. 

Kentucky’s elections are safe and secure 

As stat­ed pre­vi­ous­ly in Part I of this series, Kentucky law already requires a pho­to ID to vote. This law has been in place since 2020 despite no record­ed cas­es of vot­er fraud involv­ing cit­i­zen­ship or imper­son­ation in Kentucky. 

According to data com­piled by the Heritage Foundation (an ultra-right-wing think tank), there have been 62 court cas­es in Kentucky that involved vot­er fraud over the last 45 years. Based on perusal of the data­base, 58 of those cas­es involved buy­ing votes for local elec­tions. Three of the cas­es involved felons voting. 

However, none of those cas­es involve non-res­i­dent vot­ers or imper­son­at­ing vot­ers at the polls. There is no viable rea­son for the DOJ to demand unredact­ed vot­er rolls from the cit­i­zens of Kentucky. 

Kentucky fights for states’ rights 

As men­tioned in Part II of this series, the com­mon thread through­out all of these efforts is fed­er­al over­reach into the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly pro­tect­ed right of states to con­duct their own elections. 

Even though the fight for states’ rights is usu­al­ly con­sid­ered to be a Republican val­ue, in a bipar­ti­san effort, Kentucky’s elect­ed offi­cials are fight­ing back against fed­er­al over­reach on sev­er­al fronts. While Democratic Governor Andy Beshear fights to keep sen­si­tive data about SNAP recip­i­ents from get­ting into gov­ern­ment hands, Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams is push­ing back against the DOJ’s law­suit demand­ing unredact­ed vot­er rolls. 

The bipar­ti­san Kentucky State Board of Elections has held firm in its refusal to pro­vide sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion while ful­fill­ing all oth­er requests from the DOJ, but that has not been enough to pla­cate the admin­is­tra­tion. (The KSBE has kept detailed records of the cor­re­spon­dence avail­able on its web­site.)

This push­back against the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is not a new posi­tion for Kentuckians to take. 

Kentucky has a long and proud his­to­ry of fight­ing for the rights of the Commonwealth to make deci­sions about what is best for its cit­i­zens with­out the inter­fer­ence of the fed­er­al government. 

The Kentucky Resolutions were passed in 1798 — just 15 years after the war for inde­pen­dence end­ed. They were writ­ten by Thomas Jefferson and famous­ly argued that the states had the right to chal­lenge fed­er­al laws and declare them void in the case of fed­er­al overreach. 

In the Civil War, Kentucky ini­tial­ly draft­ed a state­ment of neu­tral­i­ty and main­tained its sep­a­ra­tion from both the Union and the Confederacy while pass­ing laws pro­hibit­ing its weapons and per­son­nel from being used to fur­ther either cause. When Kentuckians did enter into com­bat, each cit­i­zen did so accord­ing to his own per­son­al con­vic­tions and not under com­pul­sion from the fed­er­al government. 

Kentuckians are loyal to principles over party 

Kentuckians also have a his­to­ry of loy­al­ty to prin­ci­ples and ideals over polit­i­cal par­ty. At one time, Kentucky was con­sid­ered a “swing state” with a large num­ber of reg­is­tered Democrats. (In the ear­ly 90s, over half of the rep­re­sen­ta­tives elect­ed were Democrats). 

However, over time, the state has become more red and is now con­sid­ered a Republican strong­hold. In 10 of the last 12 pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, Kentuckians elect­ed a Republican. However, more than half of reg­is­tered vot­ers are still reg­is­tered as Democrats or third-par­ty, and while the Kentucky Supreme Court con­cedes that the state is polit­i­cal­ly ger­ry­man­dered in favor of Republicans, in 10 of the last 12 guber­na­to­r­i­al elec­tions, Kentuckians have elect­ed a Democrat. 

This indi­cates that Kentucky cit­i­zens are will­ing to buck straight-par­ty vot­ing in order to vote for the can­di­date they think most embod­ies the val­ues of Kentuckians. And even when keep­ing with­in the Republican frame­work, we have often elect­ed anti-estab­lish­ment politi­cians like Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, who lean more independent/libertarian than Republican, and Henry Clay, who helped uni­fy Kentucky (and the United States) through the afore­men­tioned Civil War, earn­ing him the nick­name “The Great Compromiser.” 

Historically, Kentuckians have val­ued lib­er­ty. We have shown our­selves to be a peo­ple who aren’t afraid to stand up for our own rights and for the rights of those who don’t look, think, or vote like us — even if it means going against the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment or par­ty politics. 

There is no one por­trait of a “Kentuckian.” We are a com­mon­wealth of every race, every reli­gion, and every val­ue sys­tem. As Jesse Stuart, 1954 poet lau­re­ate of Kentucky, elo­quent­ly stated, 

Kentucky is nei­ther south­ern, north­ern, east­ern, nor west­ern, 
It is the core of America. 
If these United States could be called a body, 
Kentucky can be called its heart. 
And that heart beats for lib­er­ty and jus­tice — for all.