Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State, Michael Adams, promises he won’t play games with election deniers.
He doesn’t want to pull the state out of ERIC, an interstate database of voter information that has been targeted by conspiracy theorists. And he believes that counting ballots by hand, as one opponent suggested, «would be a disaster.»
You could lose your job for saying all this, but you’re okay with that, too.
Adams, a first-term incumbent, will face two challengers in Tuesday’s Republican primary for secretary of state. Stephen Knipper, an information technology project manager who ran for secretary of state in 2019, and Allen Maricle, a former state legislator, have campaigned on claims of voter fraud.
“The other lesson I learned from what happened to my colleagues in other states, the Republicans who hold this office, is that if you feed the tiger, it still eats you. If you give in and get into these conspiracy theories, all it does is validate them,” he said. “You don’t get any respect or love for what you did, if you give in, they still eat you alive. … I’m not going to fall for that.”
Adams said he «empathizes» with Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, a Republican, who said last month he would not be running for re-election this year due to «widespread lies» about the election.
“He is a conservative Republican. He has run fair elections in this state. And he’s actually gone a little more to the right, I guess, than I have: he’s withdrawn from ERIC and things like that, and it wasn’t enough,” he said. «He still had to drop out, because the environment is so ugly right now.»
Adams took office in 2020. Soon after, the coronavirus made congregating at the polls dangerous, and Adams partnered with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, to expand voting access through joint emergency powers. They expanded voting by mail and opened countywide super voting centers in large locations. Participation increased, and Kentucky was hailed as a model for pandemic primaries.
The following year, as Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country made headlines for enacting strict voting restrictions and slashing voting by mail, Kentucky lawmakers, led by Adams, bucked the trend. With bipartisan support, the state enacted legislation that added three days of early voting, made supercenters a permanent option for counties, and created an online portal to register to vote and request ballots, while adding new restrictions, such as banning ballot collection, in the name of electoral integrity.
The state previously had some of the toughest voting laws on the books, and still does despite modest expansion in 2021, but the legislation was a notable outlier in a year dominated by hyperpartisan election law. It also helped put the Republican secretary in the crosshairs of election deniers.
Knipper, who did not respond to an emailed interview request, was running a “Restore Electoral Integrity” Tour statewide in 2021, claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that he personally watched hackers rig US election results online, according to The State Journal. He has criticized supercenters and early voting codified in the 2021 law and has fought against the use of electronic voting machines.
Maricle, who has raised much less money than Knipper, has not gone as far in his rhetoric (he has called Knipper a «dumb job») but has still discussed that there is significant fraud in Kentucky elections, particularly in voting by mail. He did not respond to an interview request sent through his website.
Both challengers have said that Kentucky should drop ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. The interstate database has recently come under fire from right-wing activists across the country, who have falsely claimed that ERIC is funded by liberal billionaire George Soros and encourages voter fraud.
In fact, the system allows states to alert each other when voters move and register to vote elsewhere, helping member states to clean up their voter rolls.
member states finance and manage ERIC; They received starting money and a 2019 one-time grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Soros-affiliated groups have funded other programs within Pew, according to Shane Hamlin, executive director of ERIC.
Virginia recently became the eighth state to exit the coalition.Maricle says it’s «risky» on his website, while Knipper has said that «our voter rolls are controlled by a George Soros system.»
Adams said that ERIC is a useful tool in election administration.
«It’s unfortunate that it was demagogic, but we’re just going to ignore all the nonsense and stay in society. I could lose my job over it, but there’s no other way to fulfill my legal oath to get these scrolls.» cleaned up,” she said.
Adams said he’ll be fine with any result in Tuesday’s primary.
«On a personal level, I won’t be so disappointed, I miss private life. This has been a very, very difficult job. When I applied, I didn’t think I would get death threats. I thought I was going to push a bunch of papers,» he said.
Still, he’s optimistic he’ll get another four years: «I can accept the result either way, but I’m very hopeful we’ll pull through. I think I’m going to win.»