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Monroe County Kentucky case involved 2022 criminal vote buying scheme

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TOMPKINSVILLE — Attempts to rig elections do happen. Corruption at the ballot box, according to Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, is “a real thing.”

But the fraud described by the commonwealth’s elections chief might not be in line with the recent, prominent public perception of how it really occurs.

It isn’t hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots in a plot to flip a high-profile national race, as described in the debunked allegations regarding the 2020 presidential election.

Instead, it’s a few dozen voters bought off in an attempt to win a few local primary races in a small town, where every ballot makes a difference.

The latest election fraud case in the Bluegrass State took place two years ago in Monroe County and ended with seven convictions. Hundreds of pages of investigative files from the attorney general’s office reviewed by The Courier Journal offer a closer look at what an attempt to steal an election actually looks like — and how Kentucky officials work to stop it.

A scheme in a small town

It all started 17 days before the 2022 primary with a Facebook message from a candidate’s daughter to a potential voter she’d seen sitting near her father at the Monroe County Fairgrounds: “hey if you or anybody u know be interested in doing a absentee vote I can get u 75 bucks for it,” it read. 

Lisa Jackson, whose father Darrell Jackson was one of two Republicans running for county jailer, sent the message. The woman she sent it to passed it on to Robbie Hutcherson, Jackson’s opponent in the race, who sent it to state investigators with the attorney general’s Department of Criminal Investigations (DCI).

Hutcherson would go on to win the primary. But the investigation, according to files obtained last month through an open records request, was just beginning — and voters interviewed said Jackson wasn’t the lone candidate involved with the scheme. 

The people gathering ballots weren’t just supporting Jackson, many told investigators. Several who spoke with DCI Detective Herman Hall said they were paid by conspirators to cast votes for Jackson, along with candidates such as Brandi Birge, who won the primary for county clerk, and Cody Emberton, who lost a four-man primary for judge-executive by fewer than 80 votes.

Emberton denied he bought any votes or knew of any such efforts in an interview with investigators. He was not charged. Neither was Birge, who remains in office today. 

Dozens of people were interviewed, and each one had a story. 

One man who’d sold his vote for $25 was found by investigators because he bragged about it to the local dog warden.

Another woman said she was given a pint of whiskey to vote for Birge before backtracking and denying the liquor was used as a trading chip (no one was charged in her case).

At one point, while they were reviewing subpoenaed Facebook messages, detectives dug up a separate scheme to defraud a COVID-related renter’s relief fund of $7,500. 

In the end, four members of the Jackson family — Darrell and his wife, Sherrye, along with Lisa and Mary, another daughter — were convicted of engaging in an organized criminal syndicate as they worked to corral votes. Those four faced other charges as well and were among seven people eventually convicted. 

  • Darrell Jackson was found guilty of paying off five people to vote for him and other candidates he supported, though the investigation connected him to more than a dozen payments.  
  • Sherrye Jackson was convicted on one count of perjury over a voter assistance form she signed (she went into a polling place with an illiterate voter and chose his candidates).  
  • Lisa Jackson pleaded guilty to 17 counts of buying votes. Multiple people interviewed said they were paid $75 each in exchange for their blank absentee ballots.
  • Mary Jackson pleaded guilty to six counts of vote-buying and one count of forgery over an absentee ballot she signed for a voter. It was in part traced back to her after she misspelled his last name. She paid between $50 and $100 for each ballot, detectives were told. 
  • Lesley Jackson, another daughter, pleaded guilty to one count of wrongful registration and was convicted in the COVID relief fraud case. 
  • Tommy McClendon pleaded guilty to four counts of vote-buying after paying four people to split $100 to vote for “certain candidates,” including Birge and Emberton, interview subjects told detectives. 
  • And Bonnie McClendon pleaded guilty to two counts of vote-buying after it was determined she paid two voters $20 each to vote for Birge. Another voter she contacted at one point sent her a Facebook message saying someone else “wants me to vote for his money.” McClendon passed the message on to Birge. 

Those seven were convicted. Meanwhile, about three months ago, the attorney general’s office declined to prosecute Birge’s husband, Roger Birge, and another person in Monroe County following an investigation into whether they had committed election crimes, saying it “could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt” that the pair had broken the law.

In an interview with investigators, Lisa Jackson said Roger Birge paid her ahead of the election for blank ballots to support his wife, though she’d had no personal contact with Brandi Birge. The clerk, who oversees elections in the county during her four-year term, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Lisa Jackson was the only one to face time in prison, because of her status as a persistent felony offender. She was sentenced to 12 years behind bars. The six others were given suspended sentences or pretrial diversion periods.

They weren’t the most high-profile races. And it wasn’t a multimillion-dollar scheme.

But Rich Ferretti, a former Secret Service agent who is now commissioner of the attorney general’s Department of Criminal Investigations, said the under-the-radar case illustrates how seriously the state takes claims of election fraud.

“It’s not the biggest, heaviest case in the world. Twelve years was the longest sentence,” he said last month in an interview in Frankfort. “… But it just shows that in Kentucky we take this very seriously. We run it out, from a tip to the hotline to seven people (convicted). That’s pretty, pretty good, in my opinion.”

The plan was complicated, convoluted and conspicuous. And the money only went so far. 

Hutcherson, who died in April, cruised in the primary, landing more than 1,000 more votes than Jackson and scoring 64% of all support.

And incumbent Judge-Executive Mitchell Page, who was unavailable for comment last month, edged out a win in a four-man race with 36.7% of the vote. Emberton was his closest competition at 34.6%. Just 77 votes made the difference. 

Birge, meanwhile, had no trouble in the race for county clerk. She scored nearly 61% of the vote against Emily Williams, outpacing her lone primary opponent by about 800 votes. Each race winner would go on to take office after the general election in November. 

A history of corruption

The case two years ago in Monroe County won’t be the last vote-buying scandal in Kentucky, and it certainly wasn’t the first — the county had two separate investigations into election fraud in 2011 related to judge-executive and magistrate primary races five years earlier, with 11 convictions in federal court.

But vote-buying cases in Kentucky haven’t traditionally targeted high-profile federal races such as U.S. president. Instead, most convictions have taken place in smaller counties involving races for local office that could be decided by a few dozen votes.

The most famous case is likely Ed Prichard. The political luminary from Bourbon County graduated from Princeton and served as an aide to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt but was famously convicted in the 1948 election of forging more than 200 fraudulent ballots, stifling a career many believed would lead to a seat in the governor’s office or U.S. Congress.

In 1985, a campaign worker for a candidate in a Monroe County school board primary a year earlier was convicted on 14 counts of vote buying and sentenced to two years in prison — his candidate won the race by 82 votes, with 88 more absentee ballots than his opponent. The result was vacated, and both candidates were disqualified after witnesses testified each of them had exchanged money or whiskey for votes.

And in 1987, The Courier Journal’s eight-part “Winning at All Costs” series examining “how money poisons Kentucky’s elections” took a closer look at vote-buying scandals in Eastern Kentucky and other parts of the Bluegrass State.

The year-long investigation focused in part on Eastern Kentucky’s Magoffin County, described by one attorney as the “vote-buying capital of the world.” Campaign workers openly paid voters as they approached the polls, the series reported, including “floaters” — people selling their votes who’d sit outside polling locations “waiting till the price goes up.”

Other candidates hired “campaign workers” in a thinly veiled scheme to buy their support. Then-Pike County Judge-Executive Paul Patton, who’d later serve as Kentucky’s governor from 1995 to 2003, openly admitted he’d spent about $27,000 to hire 144 “contract laborers” for his 1985 reelection campaign.

“That’s the way that it’s done,” he said at the time.

Current Attorney General Russell Coleman was blunt when he brought up Kentucky’s legacy of vote-buying scandals at a press conference in May at the opening of the Election Integrity Command Center in Frankfort.

“We have a history of public corruption in this commonwealth,” he said, using the Monroe County case as a recent example. “We want to ensure that that vote is protected, that that vote has value, that that vote is not purchased somehow by some pecuniary gain or a pint of whiskey. All of those anecdotes we’ve heard because we’ve seen those as prosecutors.”

Rumors of vote-buying are nothing new in Monroe County. Just ask Michael Watson, who builds caskets in a Tompkinsville storefront on Main Street, across the road from the courthouse.

Watson has spent most of his life in the town, a community he says supports families and comes together in times of crisis. Like many in the county, he heard about the 2022 case — “I didn’t know them personally, but I knew of it.”

But he wasn’t shocked.

“It used to be a lot more prevalent than it is now, but it’s always went on here,” he said in late July in an interview at The Wooden Casket, his shop in Tompkinsville. “… There used to be a lot of running jokes about ‘Somebody’s grandparents came back to vote, and didn’t come and visit.'”

New state laws aimed at voter fraud

The stories have left lasting suspicions. But officials agree the practice is much less common in recent decades.

Records published online by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found convictions in vote-buying cases have taken place in six Kentucky counties since 2010 — Breathitt, Clay, Floyd, Magoffin, Monroe and Perry.

Cases still occur, according to Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky who’s studied election and voting laws. But in modern times, he said, rumors of vote-buying in the commonwealth are more common than actual election fraud.

“There was another high-profile example in the early 2010s involving Clay County. But these are isolated incidents,” he said in an email (the Clay County case resulted in eight convictions in 2010). “Most often, the noise about what could happen is much louder than what actually happens. The fact is that election fraud is quite rare. That’s in part because we have many systems in place to catch it when it occurs.”

Coleman, who began his first term as attorney general in January, said he believes legislation approved in 2020 requiring Kentucky voters to produce photo identification at polling locations has helped. The law was passed by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature after overriding a veto from Gov. Andy Beshear, the lone Democrat in statewide office.

Additional changes to that law proposed during this year’s session by state Sen. Adrienne Southworth, R-Lawrenceburg, were not approved, but six other bills tweaking Kentucky’s post-election audit procedures and putting other minor reforms in place passed.

Adams, who, as secretary of state, oversees Kentucky’s elections and began his second term in office this year, said other factors are at play that have cut into voter fraud over the years.

Kentucky cracked down on ballot collections after former Martin Mayor Ruth Thomasine Robinson was sentenced to 90 months in prison in 2014 over a conviction on vote-buying and civil rights violations charges — among other methods, she and her co-conspirators threatened residents of housing complexes she owned with eviction if they didn’t sign absentee ballots they had already filled out.

Now, absentee ballots in Kentucky can be returned only by a family member, household member or caregiver of the voter.

“The nature of crime today, and the scrutiny and all those things play a big factor in people’s willingness to try to cheat,” Adams said.

“I think it’s harder to steal an election today than it was 50 or 100 years ago. I think that’s probably true of a lot of things,” he said. “It’s probably harder to steal money, too. Generally, the government has better backstops and protocols than it had 50 or 100 years ago.”

Still, the job is never finished. Election fraud still happens, Adams said, and while it may not be as widespread as it once was, work has to continue to ensure it doesn’t become normalized.

Adams has worked to keep voter rolls clean, removing about 350,000 inactive registrants who had died, left the state or lost the right to vote during his first term in office.

The state has also taken steps to show voters the elections are clean, including laws ensuring ballot scanners are not connected to the internet (the scanners have always been offline, he told The Washington Post, but a law on the books “puts some people at ease”) and legislation to conduct “rigorous post-election audits” and show the public the results are legitimate.

“This is one of those issues where you can’t say ‘We fixed it forever.’ You keep coming back every couple of years,” he said.

“We’re doing it constructively. I think in some other states they’ve kind of gone off the deep end, and they’re at the mercy of people that are paranoid in their reasoning and think things are happening that are not, and they’re making bad policy. I think in our state, because we’re doing it in a bipartisan way, in a fact-based rational way, in a very measured way, we’re doing legitimate things that are reasonable.”

An election looming

Not everything about the leadup to the 2024 election has been fact-based and rational.

Former President Donald Trump, seeking a second term after serving in the role from 2017-20, has continued to claim his loss to current President Joe Biden four years ago was due to fraud, and many in the party have followed suit. Republican National Committee officials have told USA TODAY “election integrity” is one of their top priorities, and The Washington Post reported job applicants to the Republican National Committee this spring were asked whether they believe that race was stolen.

But election fraud — at least at the point to swing the results — just doesn’t happen at the federal level, Adams said. There are too many voters and less to gain for those heading to the polls.

“It’s harder to influence a national election when you don’t know how many votes one would need to alter it, and you need to do it over multiple states,” Douglas, the UK professor, added. You’d need to influence “thousands or millions of votes in several states,” each with its own set of safeguards in place.

When fraud happens, Adams said, generally a “perfect storm” of three factors is present:

  • The election is taking place in a small jurisdiction, where a few votes can change an outcome and “therefore, it’s rational on some level to try to cheat.” Generally, it’s also in a primary race in a county with one dominant political party.
  • The job is one that can “reward people.” The local government is the biggest employer in many counties, he said, and positions like judge-executive, school board member and jailer can offer employment opportunities and other perks to supporters once they’re in office.
  • The election is taking place in a location where poverty is prevalent. “It’s not happening in wealthy counties, because people don’t need to sell their vote for $50 or $100. They have better things to do for money.”

Monroe County, with just over 11,000 residents, is a good example. It’s one of the most Republican counties in the commonwealth.

Of 8,180 registered voters, 84% are members of the GOP. In 2022, the only Democrats on the general election ballot were in federal races — Charles Booker, in a losing bid for Rand Paul’s Senate seat, and U.S. congressional candidate Jimmy Ausbrooks, who lost to Monroe County High School graduate James Comer.

The primary election, essentially, is the general election. Locally, there isn’t much else to rig.

For many, money is tight, as well. Watson, the Tompkinsville business owner, said the garment factories that once made up a key portion of the county’s economy have left town and moved operations to Mexico, leaving a considerable hole on the local hiring front that hasn’t been filled in years.

U.S. Census data from 2020 found 21% of Monroe County’s families live below the poverty line.

Tight budgets prevent more candidates from running and support incumbents already in office, Watson added. Most of the time, voters end up backing family members, people they know or “just whoever’s running.”

“We don’t have very many that want that responsibility, or can afford to campaign,” he said.

Adams’ office will remain diligent, he said, but at this point, he’s more concerned about the 2026 primary, when all county offices are on the line, along with many mayoral and other local races.

“That’s the year people like me need to watch out for the most, because people think, ‘Oh, the other side’s cheating me in this competitive general election.’ That’s not where the motive and opportunity lie,” he said. “It lies in the midterm, in the primary, and Monroe County just proved that all over again.”

Kentucky has steps in place to prevent fraud, and every agency in charge of elections works through the summer and fall to prepare for November.

Adams promoted the attorney general’s election fraud hotline, 1-800-328-VOTE. It fielded 595 calls in 2022, including the tip that led to the seven convictions out of Monroe County. Coleman called the hotline a “Swiss Army knife” that handles calls about legal questions, campaign violations, issues with voting machines and more.

Collaboration, too, is key. Coleman said county clerks are in touch with the state board of elections and the secretary of state’s office, and with the attorney general’s office, which assigns election fraud cases to its Department of Criminal Investigations, staffed with some of Kentucky’s most experienced detectives alongside state police and officials with FBI Louisville — “this is, I would argue, the finest team of state prosecutors in the commonwealth.”

“In Kentucky, oftentimes we’re the butt of jokes nationally, particularly when it comes to elections,” Coleman, a former federal prosecutor who built his campaign around a “lawman” image, said in May. “This makes me proud. This makes me proud that we have law enforcement officers collaborating together — federal, state and local — tearing down those silos that oftentimes we have within law enforcement, all coming together for one purpose.”

Promoting the hotline is important, Adams said, but it hasn’t been as easy in recent years, especially in rural communities. State officials do what they can to get the number in front of voters, but as conspiracy theories spread, news outlets have a smaller footprint each year.

“One thing that I have to openly speculate about is as we see a decline in local journalism, is that going to make a difference in these small-town areas? Is there going to be adequate scrutiny, not just of the elections, but of everything else that local governments are doing?” he asked. “That’s kind of an open question. This was a situation where fortunately, the attorney general’s office promoted their hotline, some good citizen saw the phone number and called the phone number. That’s really how the Monroe County case was caught.”

A busy summer and fall are ahead in the secretary of state’s office.

July and now August are all about reviewing, tweaking and approving county election plans and preparing for any issues that could arise during the election.

September and October are spent looking for “any kind of issue” that could arise — everything from election fraud schemes to faulty pipes that could prevent a precinct from opening. “I mean, it’s always something,” Adams said.

Nov. 5 is game day, with elections in Kentucky and around the U.S.

And Ferretti, the commissioner of the attorney general’s Department of Criminal Investigations, is confident that if investigators get a credible tip like the one they got in 2022, they’ll be ready to act on it.

“This type of election integrity case, this is what DCI was built for,” he said. “Free and fair elections. That’s what we’re looking to do here.”

Reach Lucas Aulbach at [email protected].

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