Adams continues state voter registration clean-up
Published 6:02 pm Sunday, November 28, 2021
FRANKFORT, Ky. (KT) – Secretary of State Michael Adams has announced that more voters were removed from Kentucky’s rolls than were added in October, as his campaign promise to clean-up voter rolls has continued.
November marked the sixth month this year that more voters were removed from Kentucky’s voter rolls than were added. In October, 6,968 new voters registered, and 7,146 were removed: 5,908 deceased voters, 873 felony convicts, 314 who moved out of state, 26 who voluntarily de-registered, 24 who were adjudged incompetent, and 1 duplicate registration.
“Ensuring election integrity is a daily process,” Adams said. “Through vigilance and diligence, we are cleaning up the mess I inherited when I was sworn in last year.”
Adams repeated that pledge during testimony before a legislative committee shortly after winning the November 2019 general election.
“We have both a federal law and state law that requires this, but we have not done so for the past decade,” he told the Interim Joint State Government Committee on November 21, 2019. “We have a federal court order from Judge Tatenhove here in Frankfort to clean up the voter rolls.”
A 2017 Kentucky Today story reported that the state had significant issues with the accuracy of its voter rolls, a decade after the U.S. Department of Justice warned that many counties in the state had more registered voters than people of voting age.
A review of records at that time found that 38 of Kentucky’s 120 counties had more people registered to vote than they had residents of legal voting age, according to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates.
Democratic registrants now make up 46 percent of the electorate, with 1,637,006 registered voters. Democratic registration dropped by 3,225, a 0.20 percent decrease. Republican registrants currently total 1,582,317, or 44.4 percent of voters. Republicans saw an increase of 2,117 voters, or 0.13 percent. In addition, 9.5 percent of voters, or 338,217, are listed under other affiliations, which saw an increase of 930 voters, or 0.28 percent.
