McCarty rebukes local GOP's open letter

The divide over election integrity between Daviess County Clerk Leslie McCarty, a Republican, and the Daviess County Republic Party continues to grow.

Darin Tapp, chairman of the local GOP, posted an open letter to McCarty on the Daviess County Republicans’ Facebook page this week accusing McCarty of making false assertions about the Return to Excellence in Elections resolution the party passed unanimously in March, which had four points of emphasis: supports using paper ballots and hand counts, supports assigned precincts and localized polling places; opposes expanding voting periods for early voting or vote-by-mail; calls on auditable balloting procedures and using proper identification to strengthen voter confidence.

Tapp said party members who attended recent poll worker training reported to him that McCarty repeatedly spoke negatively about the resolution.

“During her poll worker training, an unusually large percentage of it was focused on us — me and the Daviess County Republicans,” he said. “Several people at our candidate forum are also volunteer poll workers, and they came up to me. She made a large part of the training consumed with her talking about how we believe all the clerks are involved.”

McCarty said it’s another case of misinformation being spread.

“I probably said we have a very extreme group trying to undermine elections,” McCarty recalled Thursday. “I didn’t spend the majority of the class ripping his resolution. He’s been to poll worker training. He knows. Training was the same as it has been every year.

“It’s a long day, they are two four-hour sessions and we go through a lot. I did two PowerPoints — I did mine and I did (county attorney) John Burlew’s, since he was not able to be there. I also went over all of the legal aspects on how to stay out of jail — you don’t tamper with ballots, you don’t tamper with machines.”

Tapp remains adamant he and the party are not attacking McCarty, which she has said she feels is the case. But he makes no apologies for his stance on election integrity.

“Nobody has attacked her in any way, shape or form,” he said. “I did not want her to feel attacked. The girl does not know enough about the operating system (of voting machines) to facilitate cheating. Period. End of story. She would have to bring somebody in to inject the code that would flip the votes. She isn’t going to be the one doing it.”

McCarty said the concern over the use of voting machines and the ability to manipulate them, at least locally, doesn’t match with reality. She said it also doesn’t make sense for clerks to engage in fraud.

“I view it according to the Kentucky Revised Statute, and it says explicitly in the KRS that whoever the vendor is, whoever makes these machines, they cannot be hooked up to the internet,” she said. “So there are 120 county clerks. Why would 120 county clerks put their livelihoods, put themselves on the line to go to jail, because if a group thinks the county clerk has rigged the elections or knows the vendor has rigged the elections, why in the world would they do that?

“That makes absolutely no sense. I don’t want to go to jail. I know Art Maglinger is a wonderful jailer, but I don’t want to go there.”

Tapp said he’s also been informed of multiple employees in the clerk’s office who have expressed support for the GOP resolution, and concerns about the election process to McCarty.

“I would like to know which employees,” McCarty said. “No employee has ever told me that they support the resolution. He’s making that up.”

Tapp said it’s a black and white issue, that you don’t get votes flipped and you don’t get coding errors with paper ballots and hand counts. He said the process is the only 100% safe way.

“The countries that haven’t (gone to paper ballots and hand counts) are run by socialist authoritarian governments,” Tapp said.

McCarty said the time it would take to hand count paper ballots for a full election is impractical. She said it took eight hours to hand count the Jim Glenn-D.J. Johnson state representative race.

She’s also not convinced paper ballots would do anything to lessen the potential for controversy.

“I don’t know if they remember hanging chads,” said McCarty of the controversial Florida ballots in the George Bush-Al Gore 2000 presidential election. “They were hand counting hanging chads, and people were coming into the office and threatening them.

“And there is no way you could get it all done in 12 hours.”

Tapp is a vocal critic of Secretary of State Michael Adams, who oversees Kentucky elections. He has said that part of his certainty about election fraud is county vote totals don’t reconcile with the state’s county numbers.

That’s another divide between McCarty and the party.

“(Tapp) says zero reconciled; ours reconciled,” she said. “Michael Adams is not rigging elections. He’s getting a major award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library about working across both sides of the aisle, making it hard to cheat and moving Kentucky elections forward.

“Kentucky is recognized across the country as having one of the safest elections.”

McCarty said it’s impossible for her not to take the resolution and ensuing comments as a personal attack, and them coming from within her own party makes the hurt deeper.

“This is my job; this is what the people of Daviess County elected me to do,” she said. “For six years, I have done this. You have people hiding behind an alias (on Facebook) making comments. How am I supposed to take anything the party says seriously? It makes me really sad. What I wish is they would actually read Kentucky election laws. They don’t.

“So when they put things on the Republican Party Facebook page, it’s not correct because they haven’t actually looked up the statute, or cite the statute. That’s my wish. If they’re going to say these things, at least do it in the statute.”

More than anything, McCarty would prefer people communicate with her directly about questions and concerns instead of having accusations directed at her through social media.

“He doesn’t have the (nerve) to come and tell me to my face; they’re all cowards,” McCarty said. “They do not come and talk to me at all. It’s all second party stuff. They take what the national narrative is and they twist it to make it the local narrative. And what they say is, ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s happening here in Daviess County, but this it’s what’s happening across the country.’

“Well, it’s not happening here in Daviess County. We’re supposed to be of the same party; we’re supposed to help each other; we’re supposed to be there for each other. But they’re not. They’re not doing any of that.”