Advocacy group sues over Ky. election law that it says violates voters’ rights

A lawsuit filed in federal court Friday challenges the procedure Kentucky officials use to remove voters from registration rolls, claiming it violates federal voters’ rights protections.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth filed the suit Friday in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Kentucky, naming as defendants Secretary of State Michael Adams and the members of the Kentucky Board of Elections, all of whom were sued in their official capacities.

The lawsuit alleges that Kentucky election law, as amended by House Bill 574 in 2021, violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

“The NVRA was enacted to protect United States citizens from discriminatory and unfair registration laws, with particular emphasis on those practices that negatively impact voter participation among minority groups, including racial minorities,” the lawsuit states. “To this end, the NVRA establishes, among other things, standards and procedures to ensure the accuracy of voter registration rolls including safeguards to prevent still-eligible voters from removal.”

Under the federal law, if an election administrator thinks a voter isn’t eligible to vote in their jurisdiction because they have moved, the administrator can’t cancel the voter’s registration unless the person is first notified in writing and given a chance to respond, the lawsuit says.

“As currently written, Kentucky law bypasses these requirements and allows administrators to remove voters without any notice, opportunity to respond or waiting period, which could lead to eligible voters being wrongly and unlawfully removed,” Kentuckians for the Commonwealth said in a news release Friday.

When the Board of Elections is notified that a voter has registered to vote in a new local or state jurisdiction outside Kentucky, the Board of Elections has to remove that person’s name from voter registration records within five days, unless registration books are closed for an election, according to the lawsuit.

“The statute mandates that the State Board cancel a voter’s registration solely based on the information provided by out-of-state officials without ever attempting to make contact with the voter, and that they do so within 5 days,” the suit says.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth is asking the court to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting the state “from canceling the registration of voters without following the required procedures.”

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which works to change “unfair political, economic and social systems,” says in the lawsuit that it registered more than 2,000 new voters before the 2023 governor’s race and expects to register even more people this year ahead of the presidential election. “To that end, KFTC is hiring at least 15 people across the state, who will support its voter registration program,” the suit states.

“Currently in Kentucky, a voter might not learn they have been wrongly removed from the rolls until they show up to the polls to vote. And by then it’s too late – the voter is disenfranchised,” Beauregard Patterson, an attorney at the Fair Elections Center who is representing Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, said in the release.

“Purging Kentuckians who have registered to vote from the registration rolls in violation of the NVRA will disproportionately impact those Kentuckians most likely to move: low-wage, young, BIPOC, and other groups marginalized by systems designed to silence their voices,” said Ben Carter, an attorney with the Kentucky Equal Justice Center who also is representing Kentuckians for the Commonwealth in the litigation.

Kentucky’s House Bill 574, which is cited in the suit, made permanent some of the election procedures that were first put in place to make voting easier during the pandemic, including allowing county-wide voting centers where any registered voter in a county can vote and allowing early in-person voting for three days, including a Saturday, before Election Day. The bill also allowed county clerks to have ballot drop boxes for people who don’t want to mail in ballots.