During the May 2026 primary, one voter spoke up when she discovered the Jefferson County Clerk had assigned her to the wrong precinct. It stopped her from voting for her Metro Council representative.
After the election, we analyzed precinct assignments in Louisville and found it was a bigger problem than one voter — or even one neighborhood.
Our analysis of the Jefferson County Clerk’s publicly available address data and voter tools found that voters from more than 1,800 households may have received the wrong ballots. In some cases, the households had multiple registered voters.
These incorrect assignments could have led some voters to participate in the wrong races, and may have kept others from voting for their rightful representatives. The issue affects candidates, too: In the May 2026 primary, the error may have cost a two-term state representative her seat.
Leaders of the clerk’s office say they’re aware of problems in voter assignments that stem from redistricting in 2022. While they’re working to fix them, there are no specific laws or policies in place to prevent this from happening again.
What are precincts?
Kentucky law dictates that precinct boundaries are drawn by counties and the maps then supplied to the state. Jefferson County is currently divided into more than 600 precincts.
The Jefferson County Clerk uses precincts to distribute voters across various locations so they’re less likely to get stuck in long lines on election days. The system is also meant to ensure they get the right ballot.
Here is an example of how Kentucky Senate districts are formed using Jefferson County precincts as the building blocks.
So what happens if you’re put in the wrong one?
‘I was allowed to cast a vote incorrectly’
Ann Gilly walked into her polling place on primary day in May prepared. She had already looked through a sample ballot and researched all the candidates.
She was particularly excited to vote in her Louisville Metro Council race.
“I go to the Wilder Park Neighborhood Association meetings every month, more or less,” Gilly said. “Betsy Ruhe, my current councilor, is in those meetings, so I talk to her face and say, ‘These are the things you know that are going on. These are things I care about.’ So I was really invested in that election.”
But after poll workers at the Suburban Masonic Lodge #740 scanned Gilly’s ID on May 19, they handed her a ballot without that race on it.
Gilly said after she filled in the bubbles, something didn’t sit right. When she went back to the poll workers to tell them she didn’t have a place to vote for Metro Council, she was met with confusion, she said.
“The man said something to the effect of: ‘We don't know why it doesn't have it, but the ones over there do. Another lady was just asking about it, too, but I don't really know,’” she said.
Gilly said the poll worker told her she probably wasn’t in District 21 and to go ahead and put her ballot into the scanner. She hesitated, but eventually cast her vote.
She didn’t know that would be a crucial mistake, preventing her from voting in the Metro Council primary altogether.
Later that morning, Gilly said, she couldn’t shake the feeling she was getting the wrong advice. She confirmed again, through a city-run website, that she was a resident of Metro Council District 21.
She said she called the clerk’s office twice that morning, and was met with more confusion. A woman on the phone told her she’d file a complaint on her behalf, but couldn’t guarantee a response until after Election Day.
“I felt insane,” she said. “I think it's a natural desire to want a clean answer, something simple that didn't challenge what was happening. So, I got a lot of pushback, saying that either I did something wrong or I misunderstood something.”
Still seeking answers, Gilly reached out to us.
Cara Sabin, a clerk’s office spokesperson, told us Gilly’s address was coded into the wrong precinct and she had been given the wrong ballot. Sabin said the office had fixed the issue, but couldn’t help Gilly.
“We would always advise the voter, in the future, to call our office so we can rectify the issue at that time,” Sabin said on May 19. “We could have done more research but since they have already cast their ballot, there is nothing else we can do.”
It was a frustrating response for Gilly, who said she felt like she took the right steps by talking to a poll worker and calling the clerk’s office.
“It was definitely annoying that I was allowed to cast a ballot incorrectly,” she said. “I don't begrudge the poll workers, they are just trying to do the best that they can, but it is a little concerning that I raised an issue in that moment, and it wasn't at least addressed.”
Her partner, who has the same address, was able to vote in the Metro Council race later that day, after the clerk’s office fixed the issue.
For Gilly, it was important to feel like there was some resolution and like the issue was being taken seriously.
“There are so many questions about election rights and election processes and elections just being honest,” she said. “I still don't think it was anything intentional or nefarious, but like, if we're gonna do this stuff, it's gotta be done right.”
Another Wilder Park resident reached out to us on May 20, the day after the election. Through some initial digging, we discovered 44 homes in that area were impacted by the precinct misassignment and a dozen voters were wrongly prevented from voting in the Metro Council District 21 race. The clerk’s office said it was correcting those errors and undertaking a “full review” of voter assignments across Jefferson County.
One month later, our analysis found the extent of the issue Gilly and her neighbors encountered wasn’t limited to Wilder Park. It actually affected voters across the county.
How many other households could be affected?
After Gilly's experience, we wanted to explore whether this issue was widespread. Since the clerk's office attributed it to an error after countywide redistricting in 2022, we wondered if this affected more households in other neighborhoods.
To do that, we wrote a computer program to gather address and voter assignment data from the clerk’s office’s “Where Do I Vote?” tool. We had the program compare that information to roughly 450,000 addresses from a separate public database, which had independently paired addresses to precincts.
The addresses came from LOJIC, a local government mapping agency that routinely works with the city but said it doesn't assist the clerk with assigning voters to precincts.
For 88% of the addresses, precincts matched without a problem. About 11% weren't found in the clerk's system. It’s unclear why this is, but some were lots without houses and some were offices, while others appeared to be homes.
There were 1,827 addresses where a precinct assignment given by the clerk’s application did not match the independent precinct data.
When we charted these addresses and compared them to precinct maps, we discovered several clusters of homes that were assigned to the wrong voting precincts. That resulted in many being placed in the incorrect political districts for state and local city representation.
Some were entire city blocks or streets. Some were apartment complexes. Others were single homes.
What we found
Jefferson County Clerk David Yates confirmed Tuesday that five registered Democrats received the wrong ballots, preventing them from voting for House District 44. Their votes could have tied the election.
Clerk’s office promises audit of ‘all 600,000 addresses in Jefferson County’
We sat down with representatives from the Jefferson County Clerk’s office last week to present them with the findings.
Cara Sabin, executive director of communications, said the clerk’s office is taking the problem seriously. She promised a full review of voter precinct assignments.
“[County Clerk David Yates] has taken a team of eight people, one of whom helped with the redistricting in 2022 with Metro Council, and they are auditing all 600,000 addresses in Jefferson County,” Sabin said. “There was no reason to believe that they needed to do that, but apparently they do.”
Until we contacted the clerk’s office during the May primary, they “had no reason to question whether or not these assignments were correct,” Sabin said.
Yates was appointed to this position last October, following the death of Bobbie Holsclaw. Holsclaw, a Republican, had served as clerk for more than two decades. Yates won the Democratic primary for the office in May and, with no Republican opponent, will go on to serve a full four-year term.
Sabin said Yates and his staff quickly discovered other deficiencies in the operations of the clerk’s office, especially on the technological side. She said there has “already been some accountability” for that. The two people in charge of IT under Holsclaw are now gone — one retired and the other “no longer works for the Clerk’s Office.”
Jacob McNulty, a senior developer hired by Yates, attended the findings meeting last week.
McNulty said the data in the “Where Do I Vote?” tool is a direct copy of voter registration data the county files with the state. That means the same errors in the tool could have resulted in voters getting the wrong ballots. The misassignments prevented some people from voting in races they were supposed to and allowed others to vote in races they shouldn’t have, according to the clerk and interviews with voters.
The clerk’s office has promised that it will complete its audit and fix any issues by October. That’s when it will send postcards to residents telling them where to vote.
As for Kentucky House District 44, where data errors could have impacted the outcome of the Democratic primary, Clerk Yates said Tuesday that he plans to notify the State Board of Elections.
“While it may not be legally required, I still think it's important to have written notice,” he said.
Yates said he doesn’t think the misassignments were unfair to the candidates, but he does think they weren't fair to the voters.
“If you're represented by someone and you don't get the opportunity to vote for them, to me, that's where it becomes unfair,” he said.
A Kentucky state law lays out a number of ways to challenge a primary election.
One provision requires county clerks to file an action in circuit court within 15 days of an election if they discover an “error in conducting the polling or tabulation of votes.”
Yates did that in the Metro Council District 21 race after we reached out about Ann Gilly and her neighbors in Wilder Park, who were prevented from voting in that race. A judge decided not to order a recount because the margin was so large their votes wouldn’t have impacted the outcome.
Another section of state law allows a losing candidate to initiate a court challenge, but it has to be done within 10 days of the day of the primary election.
In the case of the Beverly Chester-Burton/Kenya Wade primary race, more than 10 days have passed and a recount of the votes — which is the only remedy under that statute — would not address the precinct assignment errors.
Yates said he does not plan to file any notice with the court about what happened in House District 44 because the election is certified and "the legal remedies would be different.”
He said one of the candidates involved would probably need to file a lawsuit in order for a judge to weigh in on what happened there. He does not plan to inform either candidate himself.
Chester-Burton was not available for an interview when we reached her Tuesday. Wade deferred to Chester-Burton to comment on the data issues.
‘It’s important that we point [errors] out and they get fixed’
Wichita State University professor Brian Amos noticed a high-profile case of voter misassignment in Virginia’s 2017 general election. There, 147 voters were put in the wrong state House district. The race was decided by 73 votes. A federal judge let the errant votes stand.
Then, in 2018, a judge ordered a re-vote for a Georgia primary election after dozens of voters in Habersham County were assigned to the wrong House district.
Amos, who specializes in political data and geography, said in the course of other work related to political lines and petitions, “we kept coming across [voter misassignment] and then decided to take a more systematic survey.”
“It's probably less sexy than some of the other potential conspiracy theories about why fraud is happening,” Amos said. “The system is mostly good. These are relatively low-percentage, small mistakes, but it is important that we point them out and they get fixed.”
In a 2020 research paper, Amos and his colleagues detailed how they found “thousands” of voters assigned to the wrong state legislative districts in Colorado and Florida. Similar to our analysis, Amos’ team focused on clusters where misassignment occurred, usually stemming from problems with data entry or digital mapping processes.
“I don't have hard numbers of how often it happens, but we do find it kind of everywhere we look to some degree,” Amos said in a recent interview.
During their research, Amos’ team communicated errors to election officials who were “graciously responsive” and corrected them. But most clerks weren’t proactively rooting out the errors that could call election results into question.
It’s been more than five years since Amos’ team recommended election officials should routinely audit their voter assignment systems as part of their election preparations, something they said even election officials with the proper tools fail to do. They also encouraged external audits instead of relying on the employees who build and work on these systems.
“The disappointing part is that usually it comes up when there's a close election, somebody looks into it and lawyers get involved and that's when people notice and start trying to fix it,” Amos said. “There's just often just not the resources at these county offices to do that, it's just not a priority. I don't know if it's surprising that they don't do it at least as often as they should.”
In Louisville, Cara Sabin with the clerk’s office said she wasn’t aware of any pre-election audits of Jefferson County’s voter assignment data and didn't know if they had ever occurred.
Another spokesperson followed up, saying three of the four members of the Jefferson County Board of Elections died and those seats were being filled by a “more involved board” that will “make sure that we are auditing things.”
The clerk’s office says its audit of precinct assignments is voluntary.
“I'm not required to do this audit – I don't think – by law, but I think anytime I see an issue or problem, it's best practice to go through and fix it,” Yates said.
Yates said he’s looking for an outside entity to help his office with the audit. And he’s put Louisville Metro on notice that he may need additional funding.
If the clerk’s office corrects its errors, more Louisville voters should get the right ballots in future elections. There may be no remedy for residents whose past votes were impacted by being misassigned.
The question remains whether auditing voter assignments will become standard practice in Jefferson County. There are currently no specific state laws requiring county clerks to check for errors in voter assignment after redistricting.
