Kentucky's secretary of state primary pits GOP incumbent against Trump conspiracies

In many primary and general elections across the country in 2022, secretary of state races turned into referendums on whether or not the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump via "rigged" voting machines and fraud, with numerous Republican candidates touting such claims with little to no evidence.

In 2023, it's Kentucky's turn.

Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams is seeking a second term in the office, facing challenges in the primary from Allen Maricle, a former state legislator from Bullitt County, and Stephen Knipper of Erlanger, who unsuccessfully ran for the office in 2015 and 2019.

While many Republicans still adhere to the falsehoods and conspiracy theories about why Trump lost the 2020 election — which are still promoted to this day by the former president — Adams has consistently rejected them.

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In an appearance on KET this week, Adams said there have been specific documented cases of fraud in several states, including a recent charge of vote buying in Kentucky, but he added "that's a far cry from the crazy myths that my opponents are putting out there about the machines being rigged to the internet and millions of votes being moved around, manipulated. That's totally, totally false."

Much of Adams' frustration with such claims during the primary campaign, even going back the past two years, is due to Knipper, who has been outspoken in both his criticism of the secretary of state and his advocacy of numerous conspiracy theories about voting machines rigging elections — both nationally and within Kentucky.

Along with state Sen. Adrienne Southworth, R-Lawrenceburg, Knipper hosted a "Restore Election Integrity" tour across the state in 2021, giving presentations where he claimed that Kentucky voting machines are hooked up to the internet and caused former Gov. Matt Bevin to lose his narrow reelection race in 2019.

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Knipper also claimed that every presidential election since 1980 has been rigged — with the notable exception of Trump's win in 2016 — spreading types of unproven claims about the 2020 election that have been promoted by the likes of Mike Lindell, the My Pillow founder who is being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company that recently settled a similar lawsuit with Fox News for $787 million.

Knipper — who advocates for the hand-counting of all ballots — touts his endorsement from Lindell, proclaiming on his website that his tour presentations were "NEVER proven to be inaccurate."

While Knipper claims Adams is complicit in these alleged schemes — which included their fight over vote recounts in the 2022 GOP primaries that Adams called "frivolous" — Adams has not been shy about swinging back at such critics, especially on his social media accounts.

This week, his campaign account tweeted that "we must keep the cranks, kooks and RINOs out of this office" and "close the curtain on this clown show by voting Adams."

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ERIC and early voting

Adams drew bipartisan praise during the 2020 pandemic by working with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear to expand mail-in absentee and early voting in that year's elections, and then again the following year when pushing for a bill enshrining in-person early voting into law.

However, Adams has also pushed through conservative reforms that he campaigned for in 2019, including the passage of a bill requiring a photo ID to vote and his office's purging the state's voter rolls of more than 300,000 people who have either died or moved out of state.

His first ad also says he defended Kentucky when "Hillary (Clinton) and Hollywood celebrities" accused the state of voter suppression in the 2020 primary election, which saw record turnout due to expanded early and absentee voting.

Adams' often-repeated phrase that he's used since his 2019 campaign is that he wants to make it "easier to vote and harder to cheat" in Kentucky.

More: More days and ways to vote: How Kentucky is breaking with red states on voting access

Knipper — who placed a distant third in the 2019 GOP primary for the office, after being the Republican nominee in 2015 and narrowly losing the general election — is far from impressed with any of Adams' aforementioned accomplishments.

Stating that "early voting is a bad idea," Knipper says Kentucky law was changed to allow election officials to see those early votes, claiming they then let voting machine companies "spy" on those results.

The mechanism in which Adams' office has been able to purge the voter rolls has also been criticized by both of his primary opponents, with Knipper claiming that "our voter rolls are controlled by a George Soros system."

This is a reference to the Election Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national database that Kentucky and 27 other states use to clean their voters rolls, sharing information on voting participation records, change-of-address forms and death records.

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However, seven GOP-led states have withdrawn from ERIC over the past year, citing a flimsy claim that it is funded by Soros — a benefactor of liberal causes who is widely criticized by conservative media and Republican politicians — and used to share sensitive voter data with liberal groups for nefarious political purposes.

Adams says the "conspiracy theory" on ERIC is false, as the only ones funding it are the state members. He also noted that a federal judge ordered Kentucky to join ERIC in order to purge its bloated voter rolls that had not been properly maintained by a previous Democratic administration.

"Part of how we have been able to locate and remove hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls is because we belong to an interstate partnership with other states," Adams said. "We've worked with the (Gov. Ron) DeSantis administration in Florida to cross-check our rolls. We had a month that we took 10,000 dead voters off the rolls in one month alone."

In a sign of the times, despite its secretary of state praising the help of ERIC in cleaning its voter rolls, Florida withdrew from ERIC in March.

Maricle: 'Be careful of the Kool-Aid'

Maricle, who served three terms in the state House in the 1990s, has also called for Kentucky to withdraw from ERIC over the same concerns, as well as calling for the expanded investigation of potential fraud involving voting machines and mail-in ballots and a new task force answer for every voting complaint.

His campaign cites himself as the only candidate with a legislative record on a voting bill, noting that he sponsored a bill passed into law that allowed voters to cast a ballot on Election Day past the 6 p.m. deadline, so long as they were in line to vote by that time.

However, Maricle says he does not go as far as Knipper when it comes to claims about election fraud, particularly his baseless claims that voting machines switched 8,000 votes from Trump to Biden in Kentucky.

Calling him a "nut job," Maricle added that Knipper "is a Jim Jones type. Be careful of the Kool-Aid."

Gerth: Gerth: At Fancy Farm, Michael Adams stood up to extremism. Daniel Cameron, not so much.

Maricle and Knipper have traded shots at each other throughout the primary campaign, with Knipper recently posting that Maricle "has made the most outlandish and irrelevant claims in the history of KY politics," while a Maricle video claims Knipper supports a "Big Government plan to track you" by requiring a birth certificate to vote.

The campaign of Adams has a major funding advantage over Knipper and Maricle, thanks in part to his own personal $150,000 loan to his campaign, allowing him to air TV ads.

By the final campaign finance deadline last week, Adams reported already spending $118,000 and having over $150,000 left to spend, while Knipper had only raised $71,000 and Maricle $22,000.

As for the critics, Adams says the only reason he has a primary challenge is because he's been "fair and nonpartisan" and "worked with other people of other political beliefs," which he says was worth it, no matter the outcome on Tuesday.

"If I pay a price for leadership, that's fine, but it's the right thing to do," Adams said. "And I think all Kentuckians are better off for it."

Reach reporter Joe Sonka at jsonka@courierjournal.com and follow him on Twitter at @joesonka.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky's secretary of state primary pits Michael Adams vs. critics