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When LPM News reported earlier this month that voters from hundreds of Louisville households may have received the wrong ballots, local elections officials across Kentucky took notice. It prompted a review of election data from the state’s mapping and election specialist – who independently found discrepancies in elections data for more than 2,100 Louisville households.
The Jefferson County Clerk’s office assigned some voters to the wrong precincts. In certain cases, that prevented residents from voting for their elected officials. It may have also impacted the outcome of a state House race.
Hardin County Clerk Brian Smith, who chairs the elections committee of the Kentucky County Clerks Association, said elections officials across the state are now reviewing their systems.
“If your next door neighbor’s house burns down, it’s probably a good idea to call your own insurance agency and make sure that ‘Hey, do I have the proper coverage on my house?’” Smith said.
Smith said it’s impossible to tell what they’ll find, but now is the time to do it, ahead of the November General Election.
“I can’t say definitively, ‘I know that this is happening in 20% of our counties or 5% of our counties,’” Smith said. “I don’t think anyone can know that.”
County clerks are also wondering how to prevent precinct misassignments in the future.
They aren’t the only ones. Kentucky lawmakers and the State Board of Elections say they are in contact with the Clerks Association to try to understand what went wrong and how to fix it.
State Rep. DJ Johnson, R-Owensboro, chairs the House Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. He said he’s asking the Clerks Association to answer questions at an upcoming interim committee meeting.
“We’re not going to totally revamp our entire elections process because of this issue, but, at the same time, we’re going to identify why it happened and we absolutely don’t intend to ever allow that to happen again,” he said.
Johnson said he plans to coordinate with county clerks and the state Board of Elections to ensure any needed reforms or resources are addressed in the 2027 General Assembly session, which starts in January.
LPM spoke with elections officials at the local and state levels, as well as one in Georgia, to understand how county clerks might better verify the accuracy of political assignments for existing voters and what challenges stand in their way.
It’s a resource problem
Hardin County is Kentucky’s fourth-largest by land area.
It has 58 voter precincts that create five state legislative districts, six magisterial districts and five school board divisions.
“By the time you draw all those lines on a map of Hardin County, it looks like somebody dropped spaghetti on our map,” said Smith, the Clerks Association elections committee chair.
As the Hardin County Clerk, Smith is responsible for ensuring all these lines are drawn properly, down to the individual household. Political district boundaries get reconfigured every ten years based on population data from the U.S. Census.
Smith said having access to good maps and digital mapping software is key to ensuring every voter is in the right precinct.
“That’s where I think the future needs to be for county clerks,” he said. “We need to make sure that not only we have the best mapping technology available, but it needs to be integrated into our voter registration system.”
Currently, matching voters’ registration information to their proper voting precinct is a manual task.
Smith said he can pull up a precinct-level map of Hardin County and the voter registration database at the same time, but the two systems aren’t connected.
“That’s where you get into more human intervention and that results in more human error,” he said. “We certainly don’t want a mistake to impact the outcome of an election.”
In Jefferson County, Clerk David Yates said staff assign households to voting precincts by typing information into what is essentially a spreadsheet.
Yates said he had no reason to suspect Louisville Metro’s post-Census redistricting in 2022 led to incorrect voter assignments. He said without LPM’s investigation and voters reporting problems during the May primary, the mistakes may have never been caught.
“This is like a glorified Excel sheet and there’s no way of catching it,” Yates said during a July 1 press conference. “If somebody makes an error in [2022], until someone brings it to your attention, you don’t know, unless you go house-by-house to audit.”
Now, staff at the Jefferson County Clerk’s office are doing just that – manually combing through more than 2,100 addresses flagged by a state election specialist. They hope to better understand the causes and impacts of potential errors by the end of this month.
The Clerks’ Association wants a system that combines the voter registration database, which is fed information by counties and maintained by the state, and the voting precinct maps that are drawn at the local level.
Smith said, ideally, residents would register to vote and the rest would be automated.
“I would love to be able to put her in the voter registration system, and it would automatically identify what school district she’s in, what precinct she’s in, is she within or without the city limits?” he said. “All of those things could be identified.”
Smith acknowledged that a person would likely still need to double-check the data.
County clerks may also need additional funding or support from the state in order to ensure their maps are accurate, he said.
Smith acknowledged that places like Hardin County and Jefferson County, because they’re more populous, get more funding.
“I have an IT department, I have an election supervisor,” Smith said. “You move to a smaller county and it’s the clerk and three or four deputies, and that’s the entire office. To expect them to be able to match what we have in resources is just not possible.”
It doesn’t help that the state funding formula for county clerks to run elections and maintain voter data hasn’t changed since the 1980s.
Kentucky law lays out how clerks are reimbursed “for the conduct of elections, including the registration and purgation of voters in the county.” It caps reimbursements at fifty cents per registered voter, but due to how that funding is appropriated and doled out, clerks often receive less.
“It says 50 cents [per voter] in the statute, and that statute was passed in ‘88,” Taylor Brown, legal counsel for the State Board of Election said. “I could probably count on one hand how many times it’s actually been 50 cents.”
There is a focus in Kentucky law on ensuring votes are properly counted: Statutes and regulations tell clerks how to administer elections, everything from pre-election checks of voting machines to counting ballots. Kentucky also requires that 5% of its counties, randomly selected, are audited after every primary and general election.
In contrast, there are no laws about checking voter precinct maps or voter assignments, at any point. There are also no requirements that clerks audit this data in the decade between standard redistricting efforts.
State lawmakers told LPM they’re open to changing state law to require audits or data checks.
Elections officials, however, appeared to be more cautious.
Smith questioned what an audit would look like: An internal check? Hiring a third-party consultant? Could the Kentucky auditor do it?
“If you pass that law without the resources to implement it, it’s just not going to happen,” he said. “It becomes an unfunded mandate.”
Smith also argued that clerks are ultimately responsible to the voters who elect them and, if they want to, vote them out.
But with clerk’s offices lacking what’s needed to identify these problems, voters may not learn of them without an audit.
Understanding the state’s role
Each county creates its own voter registration data. Then, it’s stored in the statewide Voter Registration System, a software built and operated by the Kentucky State Board of Elections. The state board treats the VRS as a clearinghouse for information. If incorrect data is uploaded to it, it’s the county’s fault and responsibility to correct it.
The State Board of Elections can create administrative
