‘I could lose.’ KY Secretary of State Adams faces a hostile crowd in GOP primary

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams spent the last four years overseeing the state’s elections — and for much of that period during a pandemic, when crowds of voters were discouraged — while swatting at conspiracy mongers who insist that elections are rigged.

His bumpy ride has brought him “a number of violent threats” and waves of harassing communications from people angry because of false claims of election fraud, Adams said recently.

Now he faces another hurdle: the May 16 Republican primary.

Adams drew two GOP opponents from a hostile faction within his own party. The winner takes on a Democrat, former state Rep. Buddy Wheatley of Covington, this fall.

Primary challengers aren’t normally a problem for incumbents, but these aren’t normal times.

Adams collected bipartisan praise for his work with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and the Republican-led General Assembly to expand absentee and early voting and purge several hundred thousand dead or inactive voters from the rolls.

Some of the most liberal politicians in Kentucky say he’s impressed them, despite his professional background as a GOP campaign legal consultant.

“I have been extraordinarily proud of our secretary of state and the quality and the work that he and our executive branch together have been able to offer the people of this state. And I think we can be assured in his presence and in his integrity,” state Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville, said in a Senate floor discussion on an elections bill in March.

However, some local Republican parties have kept busy censuring him.

These critics resent Adams’ testy dismissal of their election fraud claims and the recount demands of “Liberty”-aligned Republican primary losers last year, one of whom declared her suspicions after falling short by 36 points in her state House race. (“No one sees or counts our ballots, it’s left entirely to digital machines,” that candidate, Bridgette Ehly, posted on Facebook.)

Adams speaks bluntly of election deniers’ “irresponsible chatter,” “demagoguery” and “hogwash,” telling one interviewer, “I think they just want to watch the world burn.”

Kentucky’s voting machines, Adams says, are not connected to the Internet and are not hacked.

In a resolution condemning Adams last summer, the Boone County Republican Party wrote that he “should be held to account for publicly disparaging anyone, especially fellow Republicans, who have taken it upon themselves, at great sacrifice of personal time and expense, to attempt to achieve openness and true voter integrity on behalf of all citizens in the commonwealth.”

The critics’ latest target, now an issue in the secretary of state’s race, is the Electronic Registration Information Center. ERIC is a nonprofit national database that Kentucky and 30 other states supported in order to keep their voter rolls accurate. It let them compare their voter data as well as their driver’s license and death records.

ERIC traditionally has been respected to the extent that it is known at all. When Kentucky settled a lawsuit with the conservative group Judicial Watch in 2018, requiring it to purge dead, departed or otherwise ineligible people from the state’s voting rolls, the consent decree specifically called for the state to use ERIC as a fact-checking tool.

ERIC detected, for example, a person who moved from Kentucky to Florida and who registered to vote there, so that Adams was able to purge that name from Kentucky’s registration list.

However, a growing number of Republican-led states — including Florida — have quit ERIC this year under political pressure as right-wing websites accuse it of being a scheme funded by liberal billionaire George Soros to register Democrats to vote while also compromising voters’ personal information on poorly protected computers.

Those accusations are false, Adams says, but both of his GOP primary opponents are campaigning against ERIC, anyway.

The critics scrambled to find another electoral bogeyman after their dark predictions about mail-in voting and expanded early voting did not come true, and they couldn’t produce evidence of vote-hacking, he said.

“Here’s how I see it,” Adams, 47, said in a recent interview in his Capitol office. “When people are wrong and they’re proved wrong, they have to come up with a new argument to stay interesting and to feel like they’re relevant.”

Still, has Adams burned too many bridges among the staunch Republican loyalists who turn out for primaries?

He’ll find out soon.

“Yeah, I could lose,” Adams said. “No question about it.”

Steve Knipper

Adams’ first challenger is Steve Knipper, 52, of Kenton County, an information technology project manager who has run twice before for secretary of state, in 2015 and 2019.

Knipper claims the endorsement of Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy who falsely states that President Donald Trump won re-election in 2020 and who is being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems for claims Lindell made about their voting machines.

Knipper was chief of staff to then-Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton until he was fired in 2019. Public records show that Knipper filed for personal bankruptcy in 2016, which he said was due to his family’s medical debts.

In recent years, Knipper joined state Sen. Adrienne Southworth, R-Lawrenceburg, and a member of the far-right John Birch Society on a “Restore Election Integrity Tour” around Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana. On the tour, the speakers claimed that elections — including Beshear’s in 2019 — were rigged through hacked voting machines.

Speaking by phone, Knipper said he has serious questions about the legitimacy of Beshear’s win over Republican Gov. Matt Bevin.

On election night 2019, Knipper said, he saw a batch of reported votes switch from Bevin’s column to Beshear’s.

However, this claim of fraud has been explained a number of times as a quickly corrected typo in an election night graphic reporting Henderson County’s results. Other than Bevin, a controversial incumbent who narrowly lost, every Republican candidate running for statewide office won that night — including Adams.

“As far as, can I prove that there’s fraud? I suspect that there is fraud,” Knipper said. “I think something went very, very wrong with that election.”

Allen Maricle

Adams’ other challenger is Allen Maricle, 60, of Bullitt County, who served three terms in the state House during the 1990s. He lost his re-election bid in 1998 following news coverage of his divorce and allegations by his ex-wife about harassment, unpaid child support and an emergency protective order.

Maricle said he’s the only candidate in this race who has passed elections law — notably, a 1998 law that guarantees Kentuckians the right to cast their ballots if they’re standing in line when polls close in the evening.

If elected, Maricle said, he would run the secretary of state’s office more transparently than Adams and with less antagonism toward its critics. He also would open convenient satellite locations around the state, he said.

But Maricle said he disagrees with Knipper that the state’s elections are rigged.

“I’m not in his camp,” Maricle said. “I do think we have some problems, but I think he’s gone off on some wild tangents. There’s a reason he’s lost the last two times he’s run for secretary of state.”