KY Sec. of State Michael AdamsCompte certifié

“On April 24, Gov. Beshear and I reached a bipartisan agreement to expand voting options and ensure voting would be both safe and convenient for the June 23 election. We negotiated this agreement two months before election day in order to provide clarity for election officials,

candidates and voters. That very day, Amy McGrath called the plan ‘a win for democracy,’ and even just recently the McGrath campaign aired a radio ad called ‘A Lot Easier’ that praised Governor Beshear for this plan.

“However, on June 12, the McGrath campaign sued the Governor she has been on paid radio praising, and challenged the plan she has been on paid radio endorsing. The McGrath campaign asked a federal judge to declare unconstitutional ‘the current system of absentee voting’ that Gov.

Beshear and I worked so hard in good faith to establish, so that we could protect Kentucky voters from the coronavirus.

“The McGrath campaign attempted to rewrite, at the last minute, election rules that were agreed to long ago by the Governor and me in bipartisan fashion. Specifically, the McGrath sued to: •be able to perform the governmental function of ‘complet[ing] ballot requests over the

phone, just as Clerks are able to do,’ a conflict of interest that would be an invitation to election fraud. •extend the ballot request deadline to just two business days before the election, which would not allow time for ballots to be timely delivered to voters and then

returned – thus confusing and disenfranchising voters on a mass scale. •strike down the security requirements established for ballot dropboxes.

“Most troubling is that the McGrath campaign took aim at the overall bipartisan agreement, seeking to have it declared unconstitutional, potentially invalidating the votes that hundreds of thousands of Kentucky voters already have cast safely from home.