FRANKFORT (AP) – On election day in Magoffin County, Jerry Adams said his second cousin drove him to the local Save-a-Lot and gave him $25 to vote for Michael “Doc” Hardin for county judge executive – a key office that controls a lot of jobs in this economically depressed area.
Hardin would go on to win the election by 28 votes over Republican challenger John Montgomery. But Montgomery would challenge the results in court, and in February a circuit court judge took the unusual step of declaring the office vacant after ruling that Adams and at least three others were paid for their votes while other voters benefited from property improvements from county workers prior to the election.
On Tuesday, the state Court of Appeals was to weigh whether to uphold that decision in a case that displays eastern Kentucky’s century-old history of vote-buying in local elections. State and federal officials have a number of election fraud cases every year, so many that the Attorney General’s office audits election results of randomly selected counties each year and state and federal officials monitor elections through the Kentucky Election Integrity Task Force.
