Kentucky Governor's Race: Election Fraud

Politics & Elections
1

You can read all about it here.

Kentucky has a long tradition of electoral fraud, of course, but that’s not cause for investigating the race further by its lonesome. But one of the points raised in the article does ping my fraud-meter hard: the success of down-ballot Democratic candidates indicates that many voters were apparently splitting their ballots, voting Democratic on attorney general and other races and then switching over to vote Republican on the governor’s race.

This, the article states, is not a common behavior among voters. It raises questions about the legitimacy of the governor’s race, in conjunction with the fact that most polls gave the Democrat a slight lead, but Bevins, the Republican, won by a huge 9 point margin.

Fortunately, there IS a paper ballot trail in most Kentucky voting districts. I believe that paper trail should be followed.

2

There seems to be enough suspicion there that it should be investigated, but let’s be real: there are never investigations except into specific allegations involving specific people(such as Kentucky’s famous vote buyers). I don’t think either party wants real investigations into vote fraud.

As for a plausible explanation of what happened in the governor’s race, there are three:

  1. The coal issue was big, as was the President. The RGA tied Conway to the President and his coal policies. The downballot candidates were not directly implicated.

  2. Conway is a uniquely poor candidate, compared to Martha Coakley on occasion. There are just some candidates that parties keep on trying to push statewide and they keep on losing winnable races.

  3. The candidates who did beat out Conway in votes were pretty well known in their own right, Allison Lundergan Grimes and Andy Beshear. They would have received a lot of name recognition votes that lesser known Democrats might not have gotten. Only one other Democrat outperformed Conway.

I’d also add that Grimes herself is the chair of the state board of elections and now Secretary of State. She has all the power and experience she needs to pursue this if she sees what we see.

3

I’m a Democrat, but an election won in such a landslide is not the result of fraud. It also makes sense given how much Obama has destroyed the Democratic brand in Appalachia. I knew he’d do that, which is why in 2008 primaries, I voted for the Clintons.

4

You forgot

  1. Bigotry.

I really do think that polls failed a lot thanks to a good number of people not willing to declare that it was prejudice what drove their voting. If it was fraud I would be more confident with the Kentucky voters.

5

Except that Conway was running on a platform of distancing himself from Obama. If just being in the same party was turning voters against him, it would have turned them against the other Democrats on the ballot, too.

6

Ok, I’m reading all about it and not seeing a whole lot. The article that you linked to comes from a left-wing website, and when the left accuses a Republican of some crime, he usually turns out to be innocent. Recall the false accusations against Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Ted Stevens, …

Anyway, your article starts out like this:

No, it isn’t sour grapes. If he won, he won. Voters will be reaping what they have sown soon enough. With the state of political affairs and the sewer-dwelling the Republican candidates have done across the country, it would be absolutely possible that low information voters in the Bluegrass State could be persuaded to vote against their best interest. I wouldn’t be the first time, and it won’t be the last. For many voters, one look at Bevin’s “Obama is the devil and Conway is his clone” RNC-financed ad, and it’s a done deal. Bevin also has 9 children (his views on women’s rights are easy to ascertain from that fact alone), and he’s a Kim Davis-loving Christian. Never mind that he intends to take away the extremely successful Kynect and Medicaid expansion; he also wants to drug test seniors before they get their medical benefits. But if he hates Obama, then he’s alright with those voters and that would be all it takes.

Plainly the author wants to ensure that no one mistakes his work for journalism. He also has no problem with blatant lies:

Then there is the healthcare issue. Kynect has been a model healthcare program for the entire country. Bevin promised to undo all of that, leaving 400,000 Kentuckians without healthcare. Kuns wondered, “Why on earth would Kentucky voters vote against their own interests and split their ticket to do it?”

Bevin’s plan to close the Kentucky state exchange and switch to the federal exchange would not leave 400,000 Kentuckians without healthcare, or cost even 1 Kentuckian healthcare. It merely changes what website they would go to when buying health care.

So yeah, now that I’ve read about it, I’m thinking that there’s no evidence of fraud, and it’s just crazed left-wing ranting.

7

There’s one slight problem with this argument. Most down-ballot Democrats didn’t have success. They lost.

Here are the election results.

As you can see, two Rep candidates received a lot more votes than Bevin. Two received significantly less, and the Rep candidate for auditor got nearly the same percentage as Bevin. Apparently, some people voted for Conway but voted Republican in some down-ballot races. Proof that Democrats were cheating, or proof that not everyone votes for the same party all the time?

8

The Dems sucked in Appalachia in 2000 and 2004. This was a trend that was already well in motion before Obama got the Dem nomination in 2008. The color of his skin may have accelerated the trend, but that’s probably about as much as one can blame on him.

9

So, all that ferocious campaign stuff I read about, that was all just a big ol’ misunderstanding? All along, it was really just about changing the letterhead? He never had any malign intentions towards either Kynect or ObamaCare, and never said that he did? All made up by the liberal media?

10

I think what ITR Champion was saying was that if the Kynect exchange that Kentucky set up is no longer available, Kentucky residents can still use the federal Obamacare website to obtain Obamacare. I’m not up on the difference between Kynect and Obamacare, so I can’t say for sure if he’s right or not. However, I thought the article got its 400,000 number from the governor-elect’s promise to dismantle the Medicaid expansion. Perhaps the two combined could account for that number.

11

A Pew look at the polling before the 2014 midterms had this to say:

Maybe there’s something wildly special about Kentucky’s elections this year but the swings seen are inside that 19% estimate of those who weren’t going to vote straight ticket nation wide last year. On top of that while the win was by 9 points, Bevins only picked up 52% of the vote. It takes an even smaller swing in races with fewer third party votes to make a difference in which major party wins.

12

The Clintons were good in 1992 and 1996. What happened was that Gore and Kerry not only blew there in 2000 and 2004, but GW Bush was perfect for Appalachia. True Monica didn’t help Gore, but how he handled it didn’t help either (hadn’t he ever heard of disagreeing with his personal actions but touting his policy record instead of running away altogether?) Had the GOP nominated Quayle, Bauer, or Kemp in 2000, Gore probably would’ve won WV at least and thus the election (it had more than the 3 EVs he needed). Gore also spent no money in WV. The trend yes was occurring in the 2000s, tho could’ve been stopped or reversed sans Obama.

13

Distancing oneself from your own party doesn’t win over anyone, but does alienate some in your own party. Were other Democrats doing that? If not, that explains why Conway got fewer votes.

14

I can’t help thinking that Conway’s fairly vocal opposition to Kim Davis probably alienated a lot of voters who vote Democratic on economic grounds.

15

Also, I’d prefer a Nate Silver-style cite that gubernatorial candidates nearly always outperform the other statewide candidates of their same party before it counts as suspicious.

We do already know that there is major vote buying going on in Eastern Kentucky, quite a few indictments over the years there:

http://www.kentucky.com/2013/11/30/2963131/decades-of-poverty-and-vote-buying.html

But I don’t think you can get that many votes in rural areas to give Bevin a 9 point win. From what news reports said, Conway simply underperformed in Jefferson County, where the Democratic votes are.

16

What harm could it do to count the paper ballot backups? And considering that the new Kentucky AG will be a Democrat, the votes just might get counted this time! Not like in Kansas.

17

No harm at all. Go for it. Grimes is in position to make sure that happens. Even if it doesn’t give Conway the win, if there’s a large discrepancy it’d be worthwhile to find out why.

18

In other words, it’s sour grapes.

Regards,
Shodan

19

It might be sour grapes, but there might be something to it anyway. Probably a longshot (the chance that there was some sort of illegal activity that changed the outcome), but sometimes longshots happen.

20

The 400K people potentially losing insurance comes from rolling back the Medicaid expansion, not from dismantling Kynect. Switching from Kynect to the federal exchange is a 100% political move that will probably end up costing the state money, but it won’t directly result in anyone not getting health care.

He now says he’s just going to make changes to the Medicaid expansion and not ditch it entirely. It’s hard to overstate just how disastrous that would be; a lot of the money that used to be available for taking care of people in the gap just isn’t there anymore. He has pledged to roll back funding to local health departments, and having worked in that office I can tell you that there’s not a lot of fat in that budget, so that’s not going to be good.

Jack Conway’s whole campaign was about Bevin’s dishonesty, which is admittedly troubling, but in the end no one gives a damn about Bevin’s tax problems. Conway should have been saying, “You know that health care access you just got? Bevin wants to take it away.”

There is a ton of vote buying going on, but I’d be shocked if it happens above the county level. Usually it’s in the tiny local races (Magistrate, etc.) that just involve one or two precincts; anything bigger than that would just be too easy to catch. You also wouldn’t see any “coattails” from bought local races because almost all of the local races happen in even years.

I would support a recount for academic purposes, but I’d be surprised if there were any organized shenanigans. Kentucky is a weird state that’s hard to poll, Bevin turned out his base, and Conway didn’t. That’s all the explanation you need right there.