While the phrase “All Eyes on Kentucky” was trending on primary election day, voters here in Kentucky will have to keep watching for another week to see who won.
Typically, the State Board of Elections will announce preliminary results the day votes are cast. This year, however, results will be made public on June 30. This is part of Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams’ agreement to expand mail-in voting in order to prevent the coronavirus from spreading inside crowded polling locations.
“Under normal circumstances, the State Board of Elections receives and reports all preliminary election results on election night,” Secretary of State Adams’ director of Communications Miranda Combs said in a press release. “However, because we, like other states voting during the pandemic, have accommodated voters by letting them mail ballots on election day, not every vote will be in hand by election night. Moreover, many counties, including our two biggest, have chosen to withhold even partial results until June 30, the extended deadline for all counties to report returns to the Secretary of State.”
Election officials in Jefferson County have until June 27 to collect and certify ballots, making sure there are no duplicates and weeding out potential fraud.
They will then report certified results from Jefferson County to the state board of elections by 6 p.m. on June 30. Results will be made public at that point.
Nore Ghibaudy, a spokesperson for the Jefferson County Board of Elections, said the board has followed the state’s timeline for elections so far and will release the election results on June 30 when statewide returns are available.
“When the state board gets ready to release theirs, we’ll open up Jefferson County on our website as well, and folks will have the opportunity to see various races in the county, as well as the ones from the country, and actually see how Jefferson County voted,” Ghibaudy said.
Ghibaudy said Jefferson County had sent out 218,000 applications for mail-in ballots and an additional 11,111 people had already cast their ballots in person at the Expo Center prior to Tuesday.
Late Tuesday evening, the secretary of state's office said the unofficial count of voters who checked in to vote in-person statewide was 152,964. The final count will come Wednesday.
