A Bipartisan Election Scandal for a Former Liberal Darling

Generally the first defense of any Secretary of State or chief election official caught in a scandal is to claim partisanship. And Kentucky’s Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes has quite a scandal on her hands. Secretary Grimes was a darling of MSNBC for her Senate run against Mitch McConnell a few year back. Yet, it is her day job as Secretary of State that is getting her in trouble with both sides of the aisle.

In a nine-page letter to the Kentucky State Board of Elections, State Board of Elections Executive Director Jared Dearing, wrote:

Dearing, a Democrat, said in his letter that since he took the position last year either Grimes or her assistants have asked him and Scutchfield to do things, "we have found to be inappropriate, unethical and potentially illegal."

Among those unethical things are to ignore a consent decree which required Grimes’ office to clean up Kentucky’s voter rolls:

Dearing said in his letter, which he provided to the Courier Journal on Monday, that after about 100,000 postcards were returned he was ordered to stop scanning them by Grimes' staff. He said they were told to "slow walk" the process after he and Scutchfield raised concerns about disobeying the federal court order.

She also may have improperly used the voter registration systems to view employees' voting history and affiliation.  In other words, she may have been trying to hire for career and merit-based positions only Democrats and not Green, Libertarian or Republican Party affiliated voters. 

And yet another frightening example: she picked poll watchers (which are almost always selected by parties to watch over election officials):

Dearing also said Grimes has given her office the ability to recruit and place poll workers across the state, a task previously handled by county-level political parties and boards of elections, and was given the names and addresses of all 15,000 poll workers in order to send them a thank you letter prior to a contentious election. Previous secretaries of state were not given that information. 

“The legislators who created the laws that govern our elections placed a system of checks and balances that would allow no one individual or one political party to have an unfair advantage within the system,” Dearing wrote. “During Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes’ term in office, many of these checks have been slowly chipped away.”

These allegations mirror those of the former Republican Executive Director last year:

Last October, the former assistant executive director of the State Board of Elections, Matt Selph, filed a whistleblower lawsuit accusing Grimes of many of the same issues raised by Dearing.

The complaint filed by Selph, a Republican, and the letter sent by Dearing are both rooted in allegations that Grimes has improper access to the state’s voter registration system. Dearing alleged that Grimes’s staff was using the database to look up the voting records of elections board staffers and job candidates.

How many Executive Directors of both parties have to accuse Grimes before people start believing the allegations?  All sides, Democrat or Republican, Green or Libertarian, should agree that Grimes needs to go.    

Former Kentucky Judge Disbarred for Committing Voter Fraud

Former Clay County Circuit Judge R. Cletus Maricle has been permanently disbarred following a guilty plea of vote fraud. Former Judge Maricle was involved in a wide-ranging conspiracy attempting to control local politics via vote fraud. Seven other officials also pled guilty, including Democrat Election Commissioner Charles Wayne Jones.

This vote fraud spanned the 2002, 2004, and 2006 elections. The group, including Former Judge Maricle and Democrat Election Commissioner Jones, conspired together to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy votes in one of the poorest counties in the nation.

Former Judge Maricle was estimated to have led a scheme that used $400,000 to bribe 8,000 voters throughout the conspiracy time frame. An additional 150 voters are estimated to have had their vote stolen.

Court documents show

[T]hat Maricle used his position as judge to bribe officials, candidates for county offices, defendants in his court, and family members of defendants in his court.

In one instance, Maricle represented through others to a defendant in his court that if the defendant didn't help the criminal enterprise it would have a negative effect on his case. Once the defendant agreed to help he was released from custody by Maricle.

Further, the judge who sentenced Maricle commented that he was “involved in vote buying long before charges were even brought.”

The group of eight, also known as the “Clay Eight,” was convicted in March of 2010. In July of 2013, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the convictions due to evidence originally presented that at least several of the “Clay Eight” members were also involved in drug dealing. Any of the eight that have been convicted can be asked to be released from prison, but the government would then have the option to re-trying them on the charges of vote-buying and racketeering.