By Caleb O. Brown
Staff Writer
If Kentucky's Election Day is a cacophonous, 12-hour game of chess, Trey Grayson's job is to set the board correctly. As Kentucky's secretary of state, he's got one chance to get it right.
But no amount of planning can completely eliminate vote fraud.
"On some level," Grayson says, "it is still going on."
As a year with federal elections on the ballot, Grayson isn't alone in trying to assure a clean election. In addition to investigators from the Kentucky Attorney General's Office, FBI agents are at the ready to wring a little more honesty out of their investigative interviews. Lying to the FBI is a felony.
Efforts to keep the participants in this fall's election honest are bolstered by recent federal vote-fraud and vote-buying trials, sending a county judge-executive to federal prison for two years and convicting others of illegally funneling money to various campaigns.
The message, therefore, is clear: The feds are watching closer than they have in years past.
Grayson's office doesn't investigate vote fraud, so he'll meet with attorneys from Greg Stumbo's office and the U.S. Attorneys and talk about which races are sending up red flags. Neither Grayson's office nor the Attorney General's Office is saying if they've already got specific leads on possible election fraud in the state.
Red flag No. 1: A high number of absentee ballots cast
In the May 1998 primary, 9,000 Knott Countians voted. Tom Self, a former assistant U.S. Attorney under Greg Van Tatenhove, said more than 1,000 voters used absentee ballots, a higher percentage than any other county.
And since this particular primary ballot, at least the Republican ballot, had a U.S. Senate race on it, the feds got the chance to investigate. And many absentee voters spilled their guts.
In March, Knott County Judge-Executive Donnie Newsome was sentenced to 26 months in prison for vote-buying and conspiracy to do the same. Newsome is serving as judge-executive from jail.
Scott Sutherland, director of the attorney general's division of special prosecutions, says trials like Newsome's have had something of a chilling effect on vote fraud throughout the commonwealth.
Grayson says absentee balloting can be an especially effective way to purchase votes, since the buyer can actually watch the vote being cast and then see the ballot dropped in the mail.
Restrictions on absentee balloting have become much more stringent in the past decade. Sutherland says with proper controls, absentee balloting can work well to minimize voter fraud.
Red Flag No. 2: Nail-biters
Vote-buying seems to crop up most when a local race is hotly contested.
The same election in the same county in which Donnie Newsome was convicted of his crimes, another — though not completely unfamiliar — group of folks were discovered to have attempted to engineer a victory for a whole slate of candidates. Self, the former assistant U.S. Attorney involved in the case, said he loves the story.
The group purchasing votes recruited students from Alice Lloyd College in Pippa Passes to register and then vote for a slate of candidates.
"The students who had registered were taken to the polls and voted by absentee ballot," he said. "They were given the stickers that said, 'I voted.'"
Those students were then taken to a general store in Pippa Passes and instructed to purchase a peach Mr. Fizz soda.
"I've never heard of it ... cheap soda," recalled Self.
The combo of the particular beverage and the "I voted" sticker was the signal. The young voters were given $35 over and above the change from the soda.
Five people were either convicted or pleaded guilty to vote-buying in that scheme.
Red Flag No. 3: Assistance, please!
Vote buyers like to know what they're getting, hence absentee ballots become hot commodities for them. Trust often isn't enough to make sure votes get cast the way they're supposed to.
Impaired voters can bring someone to assist. Or, if the voter is selling his vote, he brings someone to make sure the right candidates get picked.
It's not a preferred method of buying votes, since it requires several things. A paper record indicates who is providing assistance to whom. Paper trails can be troubling for the vote buyer and seller alike.
Eastern Kentucky has a reputation as election fraud central. Grayson says so. Self agrees, saying the peach soda vote-buying scam could occur "only in the mountains." Sutherland isn't so sure, saying that it's not really fair to generalize about regions of the state. He says the true indicators are hotly contested races and high absentee balloting that can occur anywhere.
The attitude that has earned Eastern Kentucky its reputation for vote-buying can be summed up as, "It's my vote and I can sell it if I want."
According to both Grayson and Self, that attitude has largely gone away.
"The attitude still exists," Self said, "but responsible voters, especially the younger generation, want nothing to do with it."
