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Kentucky surprised many in 2020 when, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials reached a bipartisan compromise expanding vote by mail and early voting access in a state that historically had some of the most restrictive voting access laws in the country.
Kentucky has continued to buck national trends ever since. Lawmakers in the Republican-dominated state codified many of the voting access expansions introduced on a temporary basis in 2020 and where prominent Republican officials have publicly and emphatically pushed back against claims of voter fraud.
Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams, whose eleventh-hour deal with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear ushered in the new election policies two years earlier, said Kentucky has proven that states can do more to get people to the polls without compromising security.
“Both sides felt like the election was fair in 2020,” Adams said. “The voters like these things, they told the legislators they liked the extra voting days, they liked the convenience of those new polling places, so there was no resistance to either side, from other sides of voters to actually making these things permanent.”
More Kentuckians voted in 2020 than any previous election year. But despite that success, Adams said he wasn’t sure he could convince Republicans in the legislature to make permanent election reforms he said the state desperately needed.
“My nickname in the legislature was Benedict Adams,...
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