Alison Grimes Should Recuse herself for the Kentucky Re-canvass

[Time for change]

Alison Grimes, who as Kentucky Secretary of State is in charge of the running of elections in Kentucky, recently said:

I’m not only here to do my job as your secretary of state to make sure folks actually get to the polls to vote, but second, and most importantly, to support a family — both the former president and the woman I believe will be our next president.

So the chief elections officer in Kentucky, who the taxpayers pay to ensure fair elections, thinks that it is more important for her to support the campaign of one of the candidates.

With the re-canvass coming up tomorrow, I feel the need to repeat a paragraph from a recent post of mine regarding the Kentucky Democratic primary, because I now have something significant to add to it:

On Tuesday evening I was following comments on the reddit live blog while also following the KY election returns. Early in the evening, with about 20% of precincts reporting, with Bernie ahead in the state count by about 4%, several redditors noticed something very strange, which I was unable to personally observe because the site on which I was following the returns did not report results by county. What they noticed was a sudden decrease in the percent reporting from Jefferson County, simultaneously with a big increase in the vote count for Clinton. This concerned me, so I looked back at the election results, which literally seconds ago had shown Bernie with a 4 point lead, and it was completely gone – Clinton had taken the lead. Throughout the rest of the evening I saw somewhat similar comments from the redditors, causing me to believe that there were several similar occurrences, but I was more focused on the election results than their comments (which I now regret), so I am unable to discuss them in the detail that I discussed the first one.

Now I read this, which confirms my impressions from Election Night:

As I watched the returns come in last night… I noticed a trend in the numbers as they came in. Sanders would be gradually building a lead, getting it up to about 2,000 votes or so and then suddenly, a big number shift would come in and Hillary would be up a thousand, two thousand, four thousand votes all at once. Then the numbers would trickle in and Bernie would gradually regain the lead over the course of an hour or so and suddenly, once again, Hillary votes would come in in one massive dump and she would go up by another thousand or two thousand.

This unlikely trend continued all night…. Jefferson County kept injecting some votes periodically yesterday during the count but then they stopped with about 2 hours or so to go before the final votes… Jefferson County held their vote totals until about 98% of the votes were in from the rest of the state and they suddenly dumped a bunch of Hillary votes into the mix, giving her a 2,500 vote lead with 98% of the votes in and a guaranteed “victory” in Kentucky.

Also in the article is a video of Grimes cheerleading for Hillary at a rally in Louisville (in Jefferson County) before a crowd of 200 people – to give you an idea of how popular she is there.

In addition to the strange sudden swings to Clinton due to massive vote dumps from Jefferson County and a Secretary of State who is an ardent Clinton supporter, is the fact that exit polls, which the TV networks have been sponsoring throughout the primary season, were suddenly cancelled for the rest of the primary season shortly before the Kentucky primary. The Clinton vote count this primary season has consistently exceeded exit poll predictions, frequently by very large amounts. It would have been very interesting to see an exit poll for the Kentucky primary.

For all these reasons, I was very excited to hear that Bernie is requesting a re-canvass of Kentucky. But as best I can tell, Kentucky uses electronic voting machines WITH NO PAPER TRAIL in at least some counties. I have been unable to determine which counties do this, but I suspect that Jefferson County is likely to be one of them. Add to that a highly partisan Secretary of State, and the biggest questions are: How is the true vote count going to be determined where there is no paper trail? Does anyone have the capability to ascertain vote rigging by inspecting these machines? If attempts are made to do so, are the voting machine manufacturers going to try to block such inspections with the excuse that their machines are “proprietary”? And if so, is the Secretary of State going to roll over and let them get away with that? And if and where paper trails are available, will the vote counting be open to public inspection (as in Florida 2000) to make sure that the counting is done fairly?

These are all extremely important questions, and the Secretary of State is going to have a big role to play in all of them, and more. Democracy cannot afford to have this done by someone who says that it is more important for her to support one of the candidates than it is to ensure a fair election, especially given the highly suspicious election returns we saw in the Kentucky primary last week. We had that with Katherine Harris in the 2000 Presidential election in Florida and Kenneth Blackwell in the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio. In both cases, the election of George W. Bush was the result. We also saw it with Roberta Lange at the Nevada Democratic State Convention a couple weeks ago. This kind of thing cannot be tolerated in a country that calls itself a democracy. Alison Grimes must recuse herself for this very important re-canvassing process if we are to have much confidence in the results.