STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
I'm Steve Inskeep with the story of elections gone wrong. Some Kentucky voters have been getting the wrong ballots and voting in the wrong races for years. Louisville Public Media exposed this by investigating the city's election data. LPM's Justin Hicks is here to tell us about it. Good morning.
JUSTIN HICKS, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: How'd you find out about this?
HICKS: So in Kentucky, as some people may know, we had a primary election a little bit more than a month ago. And during that election, one voter reached out to us and told us that she had cast a ballot with the wrong races on it. And she reached out to our city politics reporter, Roberto Roldan, and he started making some calls. And it turned out, local election officials said it was due to errors in their data that happened several years ago during redistricting. But they also said by that point, there was nothing they could do to fix that one woman's ballot because it had already been cast.
INSKEEP: Wow. So too late to do anything about that. Sounds serious.
HICKS: Exactly. Yeah. And it - so it got us wondering just how big this problem might be. So I wrote a computer program. It scraped the clerk's public records on political district assignments for nearly half a million addresses here in Louisville, and we didn't look up anyone's individual voter records or anything like that. But what we did find was that a little bit more than 1,800 households may be assigned into the wrong voting precincts. And so in some cases, that let people vote in political races they shouldn't have, and in others, it barred them from picking their own representatives. And it's even calling into question the results of this one state House race.
INSKEEP: Wow.
HICKS: Yeah. The losing candidate in that primary could potentially file a lawsuit over that, but we haven't seen that yet. We presented this to Jefferson County clerk David Yates. He's the top election official in Louisville, and he's only been on the job for less than a year, but he admitted there's some pretty big problems with the election data.
DAVID YATES: This has to be hammered out. This is part of a bigger issue. Some of the individuals sometimes that have voted six different times and not be able to hold their local politician at whatever level accountable, I think that they have been failed in some regard.
HICKS: And so, of course, Yates, he now wants to fix this, and he's asking for more money to manually audit - with human beings - this data, house by house. And he said he's committed to having things fixed by the November midterms.
INSKEEP: Oh, yeah. I imagine so. Now, I just want to put this in broader context here. We have all these conspiracy theories about stolen elections. Again and again, no evidence, no reliable evidence in 2020, for example. But here it is public media that actually looked into data and did some authentic investigation and did find some evidence of wrong ballots being cast. How common could this be?
HICKS: Right. So first of all, there's no big conspiracy theory here or malicious wrongdoing, at least as far as we know. It could all be clerical errors because elections are run by local governments, hundreds and thousands of them around the country. And political boundaries...
INSKEEP: Sure.
HICKS: ...Of course, are changing all the time due to redistricting. Still, what we found in Louisville probably isn't that common thinks Ben (ph) Amos with Wichita State University. He's researched voter misassignment in multiple states and says data errors just happen. Still, few local governments devote time and money to checking for them.
BRIAN AMOS: The difficult thing is that these offices are often underfunded. It's understandable why they might not put it as a top priority.
HICKS: So data errors do happen, and we found these because one listener paid attention to her ballot and let us know about it and just wouldn't let it go.
INSKEEP: Well, I'm glad you devoted the time to checking this. Justin, thanks so much.
HICKS: Of course. Always happy to do it.
INSKEEP: Justin Hicks of Louisville Public Media, who reported with Roberto Roldan on that story. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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