On June 2, Attorney General Russel Coleman, in a live-streamed event, randomly drew the names of 12 Kentucky counties from a bourbon barrel — which is tradition. One was Daviess County.
This is County Clerk Leslie McCarty’s eighth year in her position — and about her fifth time being selected for a random post election audit. It’s not because there have been errors in her team’s work.
“They just want to make sure everything is fair and balanced, transparent,” she said. “All 120 of us county clerks do that, so they just want to make sure that we all followed the law …”
The Attorney General’s Office requests about 30 different items or sets of data such as tapes from the machines, grand jury or sheriffs reports and anything with main and absentee ballots.
The inquiries will be conducted by the Attorney General’s Department of Criminal Investigations (DCI) to look for irregularities that occurred during the election.
McCarty said at this point, being audited is “old hat” but still, she thinks they may need to change the luck-of-the-draw model to limit countries who’ve audited recently.
“I'm tired of being picked on five times in eight years, is a little excessive, I do believe,” she said with a laugh.
McCarty said they’re ready for this audit. She said the auditors are looking for "inconsistencies" and anything that can amount to voter suppression.
“They're looking for fraud, they're looking for things that just don't add up or match up, you know, they're looking to see if people voted multiple times.”
One thing she expects to be questioned about? When a squirrel ate through a power line and knocked out a vote center for 90 minutes. “We're calling it the Great Squirrel Outage of 2026,” she said.
They’re thinking about making commemorative t-shirts.
The 12 counties selected are Rowan, Oldham, Franklin, Daviess, Laurel, Adair, Scott, Union, Fulton, Carroll, Floyd and Pike.
After the independent investigations are complete, the DCI and the Attorney General’s Special Prosecutions Unit will present their findings to a grand jury of each audited county.
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