When LPM News reported earlier this month that voters from hundreds of Louisville households may have received the wrong ballots, local elections officials across Kentucky took notice. It prompted a review of election data from the state's mapping and election specialist – who independently found discrepancies in elections data for more than 2,100 Louisville households.
The Jefferson County Clerk's office assigned some voters to the wrong precincts. In certain cases, that prevented residents from voting for their elected officials. It may have also impacted the outcome of a state House race.
Hardin County Clerk Brian Smith, who chairs the elections committee of the Kentucky County Clerks Association, said elections officials across the state are now reviewing their systems.
"If your next door neighbor's house burns down, it's probably a good idea to call your own insurance agency and make sure that 'Hey, do I have the proper coverage on my house?'" Smith said.
Smith said it's impossible to tell what they'll find, but now is the time to do it, ahead of the November General Election.
"I can't say definitively, 'I know that this is happening in 20% of our counties or 5% of our counties,'" Smith said. "I don't think anyone can know that."
County clerks are also wondering how to prevent precinct misassignments in the future.
They aren't the only ones. Kentucky lawmakers and the State Board of Elections say they are in contact with the Clerks Association to try to understand what went wrong and how to fix it.
State Rep. DJ Johnson, R-Owensboro, chairs the House Elections, Constitutional Amendments and Intergovernmental Affairs Committee. He said he's asking the Clerks Association to answer questions at an upcoming interim committee meeting.
"We're not going to totally revamp our entire elections process because of this issue, but, at the same time, we're going to identify why it happened and we absolutely don't intend to ever allow that to happen again," he said.
Johnson said he plans to coordinate with county clerks and the state Board of Elections to ensure any needed reforms or resources are addressed in the 2027 General Assembly session, which starts in January.
LPM spoke with elections officials at the local and state levels, as well as one in Georgia, to understand how county clerks might better verify the accuracy of political assignments for existing voters and what challenges stand in their way.
It's a resource problem
Hardin County is Kentucky's fourth-largest by land area.
It has 58 voter precincts that create five state legislative districts, six magisterial districts and five school board divisions.
"By the time you draw all those lines on a map of Hardin County, it looks like somebody dropped spaghetti on our map," said Smith, the Clerks Association elections committee chair.
As the Hardin County Clerk, Smith is responsible for ensuring all these lines are drawn properly, down to the individual household. Political district boundaries get reconfigured every ten years based on population data from the U.S. Census.
Smith said having access to good maps and digital mapping software is key to ensuring every voter is in the right precinct.
"That's where I think the future needs to be for county clerks," he said. "We need to make sure that not only we have the best mapping technology available, but it needs to be integrated into our voter registration system."
Currently, matching voters' registration information to their proper voting precinct is a manual task.
Smith said he can pull up a precinct-level map of Hardin County and the voter registration database at the same time, but the two systems aren't connected.
"That's where you get into more human intervention and that results in more human error," he said. "We certainly don't want a mistake to impact the outcome of an election."
In Jefferson County, Clerk David Yates said staff assign households to voting precincts by typing information into what is essentially a spreadsheet.
Yates said he had no reason to suspect Louisville Metro's post-Census redistricting in 2022 led to incorrect voter assignments. He said without LPM's investigation and voters reporting problems during the May primary, the mistakes may have never been caught.
"This is like a glorified Excel sheet and there's no way of catching it," Yates said during a July 1 press conference. "If somebody makes an error in [2022], until someone brings it to your attention, you don't know, unless you go house-by-house to audit."
Now, staff at the Jefferson County Clerk's office are doing just that – manually combing through more than 2,100 addresses flagged by a state election specialist. They hope to better understand the causes and impacts of potential errors by the end of this month.
The Clerks' Association wants a system that combines the voter registration database, which is fed information by counties and maintained by the state, and the voting precinct maps that are drawn at the local level.
Smith said, ideally, residents would register to vote and the rest would be automated.
"I would love to be able to put her in the voter registration system, and it would automatically identify what school district she's in, what precinct she's in, is she within or without the city limits?" he said. "All of those things could be identified."
Smith acknowledged that a person would likely still need to double-check the data.
County clerks may also need additional funding or support from the state in order to ensure their maps are accurate, he said.
Smith acknowledged that places like Hardin County and Jefferson County, because they're more populous, get more funding.
"I have an IT department, I have an election supervisor," Smith said. "You move to a smaller county and it's the clerk and three or four deputies, and that's the entire office. To expect them to be able to match what we have in resources is just not possible."
It doesn't help that the state funding formula for county clerks to run elections and maintain voter data hasn't changed since the 1980s.
Kentucky law lays out how clerks are reimbursed "for the conduct of elections, including the registration and purgation of voters in the county." It caps reimbursements at fifty cents per registered voter, but due to how that funding is appropriated and doled out, clerks often receive less.
"It says 50 cents [per voter] in the statute, and that statute was passed in '88," Taylor Brown, legal counsel for the State Board of Election said. "I could probably count on one hand how many times it's actually been 50 cents."
There is a focus in Kentucky law on ensuring votes are properly counted: Statutes and regulations tell clerks how to administer elections, everything from pre-election checks of voting machines to counting ballots. Kentucky also requires that 5% of its counties, randomly selected, are audited after every primary and general election.
In contrast, there are no laws about checking voter precinct maps or voter assignments, at any point. There are also no requirements that clerks audit this data in the decade between standard redistricting efforts.
State lawmakers told LPM they're open to changing state law to require audits or data checks.
Elections officials, however, appeared to be more cautious.
Smith questioned what an audit would look like: An internal check? Hiring a third-party consultant? Could the Kentucky auditor do it?
"If you pass that law without the resources to implement it, it's just not going to happen," he said. "It becomes an unfunded mandate."
Smith also argued that clerks are ultimately responsible to the voters who elect them and, if they want to, vote them out.
But with clerk's offices lacking what's needed to identify these problems, voters may not learn of them without an audit.
Understanding the state's role
Each county creates its own voter registration data. Then, it's stored in the statewide Voter Registration System, a software built and operated by the Kentucky State Board of Elections. The state board treats the VRS as a clearinghouse for information. If incorrect data is uploaded to it, it's the county's fault and responsibility to correct it.
The State Board of Elections can create administrative regulations – legal requirements – for clerks. But board officials said there currently are none that require clerks to check the accuracy of political district assignments in the data they upload to the statewide VRS.
And they're hesitant to implement that. Election officials believe many poorer counties don't have the technical expertise or money for employees and tools to verify their own data.
"I think at this point, giving explicit step-by-step instructions about that would probably be a burden on more counties than it would not be," Taylor Brown, legal counsel with the election board, said.
Still, the Kentucky State Board of Elections said it routinely helps counties confirm voter data accuracy, at their request.
Even then, there's a bottleneck: The state board said it has just one mapping specialist on staff who knows how to analyze counties' registration data to make sure voters are getting placed in the correct political districts. It's a process called "geocoding."
"The problem is we are limited," Richard House, assistant director for the State Board of Elections, said. "A lot of counties want us to geocode their voters, and we will get to them and there is a list right now of people that are in the queue to do that."
After analysis, counties have to update their data themselves. It is ultimately their responsibility to ensure accuracy.
State election board officials said they are working toward a day when they can offer counties a way to do this work on their own.
The state did create a tool earlier this year to help clerks verify new voter records. The "County Clerk Web Application" allows them to enter an address into an interactive map and see which political districts and precinct that address falls within. They're also hoping voters will use it to check for any discrepancies with their voting assignments.
Eventually, the state will figure out a system for clerks to apply digital mapping techniques that would verify the current voter registration system, Brown said.
"SBE is on a collision course with these things being married and merged and all that," he said, borrowing a quote from a former University of Louisville football coach. "The only variable is time."
Brown added there's only one variable that could speed up time: money.
One Georgia official found a solution
Thomas Braatz is the elections director for Hall County, Georgia – about an hour's drive north of Atlanta. After decades as an engineer, Braatz joined the local clerk's election team about 10 years ago because he was curious "how elections actually really work."
Braatz is the first to admit things haven't gone perfectly in his tenure. In 2024, hundreds of voters were given the incorrect ballots for a city council race after political redistricting. Braatz said the cause was a bit different than the error LPM uncovered in Jefferson County, but the effect on voters was similar.
"People got the wrong ballots," he said. "So, you have people voting for things that they shouldn't have been, and some who should have been didn't."
Today, Braatz prides himself on his consistent fact-checking of voter registration data. Before each election, he verifies that voters are placed in the right political districts. He also teaches election officials in other Georgia counties to do the same.
"It is an attitude that you have to solve your own problems…and then reach out and share that with others to help them solve their problems and show them the way as well," he said.
Braatz said, oftentimes, it takes getting the county's election data experts and property mapping experts in the same room. Once the two departments start working together, detailed data used to locate properties for taxation or emergency calls and data about voters can be paired.
"The concept is really, really simple," Braatz said.
This process is similar to the way LPM uncovered discrepancies in voter precinct assignments.
Braatz said after he read LPM's investigation, he emailed and called the Jefferson County Clerk's office with an offer to outline his process. He said he never got a reply. A spokesperson for the clerk's office, Cara Sabin, confirmed they received an email from him but wasn't sure about any phone calls.
Sabin separately said the office aims to solicit bids early next month from third-party contractors to help audit the accuracy of Jefferson County's voter roll.
Braatz said an outside contractor that may cost a lot of money seems potentially wasteful and "way out of context with what needs to be done."
He said he understands the issue and the solution clearly. If they shared data, he's confident he could help Jefferson County.
"I'll do that from the kitchen table in a couple hours," he said. "That's what makes it so maddening and that's why unfortunately governments are viewed as somewhere between ineptitude and impunity."
State lawmakers want answers and a fix
Many of these issues, and potential solutions, will likely be discussed at a state House committee hearing next month.
Rep. DJ Johnson will co-chair an Aug. 18 interim committee meeting to which he invited the County Clerks Association. These meetings, held outside the General Assembly session, are typically used to inform potential legislation.
"I've asked them to come in and just give us a presentation on what happened [in Jefferson County]," he said. "What caused the situation and what do we need to do to fix it? Is something that needs to be fixed at the local level, or is there something we need to do statewide?"
Johnson said Kentucky already requires voters to show ID and use auditable paper ballots. He feels good about those procedures, but admitted that pre-election checks could be stronger.
"The focus has been on election day and post-election verification, and now we are shifting our focus a little bit more to pre-election activities," he said. "That really boils down to voter roll accuracy."
Johnson said he is open to conversations about short-term fixes, as well as long-term solutions, such as changes to state law.
Another prominent House Republican, Majority Whip Jason Nemes, said he'd like to see the General Assembly address these issues in the 2027 session.
Nemes, who represents parts of southeastern Jefferson County and Shelby and Oldham Counties, said he's particularly concerned about the impact voter precinct misassignments had on the House District 44 race.
In that primary, Democratic state Rep. Beverly Chester-Burton lost to newcomer Kenya Wade by five votes. After reporting by LPM, the Jefferson County Clerk's Office determined five registered Democrats were prevented from voting in the race.
"We don't know whether the lady who appeared to have won actually won," Nemes said. "So that triggers some conversations that need to be had on what to do with that."
When it comes to additional funding for county clerks, Nemes said it'll be up to the Clerks Association and its advocates to "make the case that they don't already have the funding" to address the problem. If they can do that, he thinks there will certainly be interest from state lawmakers.
"If there's a need for some dollars to make sure that we have people voting in the right districts, which means in the right races, yeah, then that's extremely important," he said. "If looking at extra funding is the resolution, I think I would certainly support that and I think most would."
In 2024, lawmakers considered upping the reimbursement rate to counties for election administration from 50 cents per voter to $1.50. But that language was stripped out before the final version passed into law. Instead, members of local election boards got a state-mandated pay raise for each day they meet – from a minimum of $15 a day to $50 a day.
The General Assembly also approved a two-year budget during its session earlier this year, which means funding for state agencies is locked in until 2028.
It's not clear whether addressing voter precinct errors would require reopening the budget — which may be unpopular — or if lawmakers could shift funding from elsewhere to address the problem.
Satchel Walton contributed reporting.
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