March 22, 2021- 1:47 p.m
On a Thursday in August in Louisville, months before the 2020 election, a parade of cars filled with Kentucky Teamster representatives and labor groups, showed their fury at Mitch McConnell’s constant blocking of critical COVID aid. They drove by McConnell’s office raucously honking and bearing signs saying “Mitch better have my money.”
In 2017, a Public Policy Polling Survey asked Kentuckians, “Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch McConnell’s job performance?” Only 18% approved.
He clawed his rating back up to 39% on the eve of the election.McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, rarely holds town hall meetings with Kentucky voters—not since a heated exchange with an angry constituent went viral.
So, what exactly drove these angry Kentuckians to reelect Mitch McConnell with a 19-point advantage over opponent Amy McGrath—57.8% to 38.2%?Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one’s asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election.
There were wide, unexplained discrepancies between the vote counts for presidential candidates and down-ballot candidates.Significant anomalies exist in the state’s voter records.
Forty percent of the state’s counties carry more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens.Kentucky and many other states using vote tabulation machines made by Election Systems & Software all reported down-ballot race results at significant odds with pre-election polls.
The 2020 Kentucky U.S. Senate election results mapDCReport focused on the results in three counties in eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains, two of which Democrats usually always win, but similar patterns emerge in other counties across the state. Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Democrats as recently as the 2019 gubernatorial election, there were a staggering number of Democrats voting Republican in 2020.
In rural Breathitt County, for instance, there are 9,508 registered Democrats and just 1,599 registered Republicans. The county has a history of close contests, but Amy McGrath got only 1,652 votes versus 3,738 for McConnell, a 67% to 29% trouncing. McGrath’s votes, if accurate, equaled only 17% of registered Democrats in Breathitt County.
Conventional political wisdom in McConnell-land holds that these days “ancestral Kentucky Democrats” vote Republican, and analysts shouldn’t correlate party registration with voting patterns.
But simply dismissing any anomalies based on anecdotal hearsay ignores the data and other possible explanations. McConnell won Breathitt County in 2020 with 1,308 more votes than he received in the county’s much closer 2014 race, which he won by fewer than 400 votes.
The 2019 governor’s race was also a squeaker in Breathitt County, but Democrat Andy Beshear eked out a 69-vote victory. Beshear won the race statewide.
McConnell’s results were even more out of whack in two other nearby Appalachian counties. In his six previous Senate elections, Elliott and Wolfe counties had never voted for McConnell.
Even up to last year, Elliott County remained reliably Democratic in non-presidential races, voting for the party’s entire Democratic slate in both the 2015 and 2019 statewide elections.
Yet in 2020, McConnell won 64% of the votes in Wolfe County and 66% of the votes in Elliott County. McGrath only got 21% of registered Democrats in Wolfe and 20% in Elliott.
Next, take the premise that there would be some basic logic in the voting patterns of those who did vote Democratic. One might expect a registered Democrat, who’s going to vote Democratic, would walk into the booth and cast their vote for both Joe Biden and Amy McGrath. But the data tell another story.
In 119 of 120 counties, Amy McGrath got more votes than Joe Biden. In some counties, the votes were close. But in counties like Breathitt and Elliott, 1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.
Then there is the question of why a county like Breathitt has more registered voters than it has people of voting age? 2019 population data shows that Breathitt County had 12,630 people with approximately 23% below the voting age of 18. This means approximately 9,700 people are of voting age, yet there are 11,497 registered voters.
Having 100% of the voting-age population registered would be astounding enough, but Breathitt County appears to have almost 120% more registered voters than age-eligible citizens. And looking further, it appears this is not limited to Breathitt.
In November 2017, Judicial Watch, a right-wing non-partisan foundation promoting transparency, sued Kentucky over its “Dirty Voter Rolls” and its failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists.
The suit argued that 48 of the 120 Kentucky counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18 and alleged that Kentucky was one of only three states with a statewide active registration rate greater than 100% of the age-eligible citizen population.
Kentucky’s inflated voter rolls, and lack of transparency, provide a perfect cover for malfeasant behavior regarding the election results.
