Elections officials in Kentucky are in a state of near panic over their elections system, saying local voting systems are "one emergency away from disaster." There's one person in the country who can help them fix it, one of their own—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he's refusing to do so.
"There’s a lot of hand wringing over the Russians, there’s hand wringing from the far right about illegal immigrants voting and all that,” Don Blevins, Jr., clerk for Fayette County, told Mother Jones. He says he’s more worried "about Americans cheating than anybody." From hacking to bringing down voter registration servers to making bomb threats on Election Day, there's a lot that can be done to disrupt the election. While he says his county's systems are better secured than may in the state, he worries that the "smaller counties are in dire straits, and Kentucky for a combination of reasons. […] They are chronically underfunded for just basic government services, much less elections related expenses."
"For the last six or eight years, we have not taken in enough tax money to maintain anything," says Elliott County clerk Jennifer Carter. "If they get four or five miles of blacktop for this entire county in one year, we’re flying. That's how bad it is. So, yeah, election equipment or replacing machines? That's on the back, back burner." Carter says that even with a new occupational tax coming, "it would just not be possible for us to have the money to upgrade our voting machines. We're one emergency away from disaster." It's been over 16 years since the county purchased new equipment.
And McConnell is standing in the way of fixing it, stopping the federal funding that has passed in the House from advancing. "Mitch's inaction is directly harming his home state," Blevins said. "There's no question in my mind."
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State Board of Elections Executive Director Jared Dearing is also alarmed. The state has forced steep budget cuts and "Many counties are currently facing budgetary shortfalls that create uncertain and unstable funding for the county clerks and boards of elections," he wrote in a letter to the state legislature, protesting the cuts. "While at the same time election costs continue to grow. This included the need to replace outdated election equipment as well as secure against digital and cybersecurity threats that did not exist even a decade ago, much less in 1974" when a state law set a reimbursement rate of $225 per precinct from the state to counties. The budget shortfall this year cut that rate to $200.
There's $1 billion at the ready for states to secure their elections, passed by the House which McConnell won't allow. Carter would love to have McConnell come visit to talk elections. "I would show him one of our old machines. […] I'd say, 'Hey, this is where we're at, this is what we still have. If two machines break, we'd be doing paper ballots in a box.'" At least there would be a paper trail.