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Full interview: Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams

Full interview: Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams
Sir. Uh First of all, thank you very much for joining us today in the fight against election fraud. Let's talk about the fight over fraud detection. The electronic registration information center known as Eric is *** group of states that helps individual states know when residents might be double voting or registered in two different states, et cetera. There's *** controversy though over some states that are leaving Eric and participating, your state is thinking of leaving. Why? Well, Eric has been *** godsend to Kentucky. We've taken well over 300,000 voters off the rolls who are inactive, who passed away, moved away, et cetera. We could have done that without Eric. It's been really helpful to us. However, we've had about *** quarter of Eric's membership. States leave. And so now our news are going up and so Kentucky is about to pay *** lot more money to get *** lot less information. And specifically the states that are leaving disproportionately are the states where people are moving into Kentucky from or to from Kentucky, our neighboring states, Ohio, West Virginia and Missouri. And so when those neighboring states leave, Eric, I have to come up with some other way to get their information and, and get them more information. So I've been in *** number of conversations already here at this conference with my colleagues in other states to come up with solutions or we can trade information bilaterally. You mentioned the cost and correct me if I'm wrong here. I think I have that Kentucky was paying 40,000 and I think the cost would go up to 65 total budget. 14 billion doesn't seem like *** huge amount of money. Well, that's part of why we're staying in for another year is we can, we can eat that. But then I have to go back to our legislature in *** year after that and ask them for more money. And especially if Texas leaves, which is anticipated, then it's really going to skyrocket our dues. So, just to be clear at this conference, you're trying to do single deals with different neighboring states. Yeah, that's, that's part of what I have in mind if we can come up with some sort of multi state compact where we can reach the states that have left, er, or never joined Eric and cover that blind spot. If you will, then that's helpful. That's something else that we're doing is we're having conversations with federal agencies to try to get information direct from them. We had *** month not long ago in Kentucky we took 10,000 dead voters off the rolls in one month and none of them had lived in Kentucky for *** long time. They had all moved to other states like Florida. Well, Florida doesn't belong to Eric anymore. So I have to come up with *** way to get information when Kentuckians vote in Kentucky and they move away and pass away. If I can't get that through Eric, I have to find another way. And so we're working with the Social Security Administration and the U SPS to try to step up our federal reporting as well. We're at the annual summer conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State. One of the big topics here at this conference has always been misinformation and disinformation. And so I want to talk about this new frontier now of misinformation, Artificial Intelligence. *** I, we've seen it already in some ads. Are you worried about *** I misleading voters in your state? So I actually think this is the number one issue that we're talking about behind the scenes at this conference. It's always *** new threat and that's today's big one. There's been *** lot of coverage of *** I recently, we've seen, we've seen public officials whose own family can't tell that they're being resembled by my chat G BT or *** I. We have concern that the technology exists now that *** fake Twitter profile of me could be set up and someone could figure out how I communicate and communicate as though they were that could happen though. Not just for me, that could happen with the governor or anyone else in government. So it's not uniquely *** threat to our elections. It's *** threat to democracy, certainly. And *** threat to government. We're working on it. And so we're going to be part of that conversation with other agencies. And that's one of the things that we're talking about with other federal agencies that are here. It's hard for journalists too. Sure. Absolutely. Uh Let me ask you about *** different topic here. It still stay on this information. The Brennan Center for Justice in April released survey results that found about one in five election workers, 20% are considering quitting before the 2024 presidential election. That's equivalent to 1 to 2 election officials. They said quitting every day since the 2020 presidential election. They faced unprecedented threats as you know, disinformation challenges, et cetera. Are you expecting higher than normal turnover of election workers in your state? Yes, but it's for *** number of reasons. One reason is most of our poll workers are senior citizens. And so there's *** natural attrition there. But part of it is because of the unhealthy environment that's been created where people don't really feel safe. Another part of it is that younger generations just don't step up and volunteer the way their parents or grandparents did. I was elected in 2019. The first speech I gave before I was even sworn in was in the legislature and I laid out my priorities and I said our biggest crisis that we were facing was the decline in volunteer poll workers. That was in November 2019 before COVID before 2020. That's still true though. None of that got fixed. So that's my biggest concern going into 2024. I've got an election this year as well. So that's *** good dry run for us if you will. That's one of my biggest concerns going to 24 is can I find the bodies to open up our precincts in Kentucky? We've got about 3800 precincts and each one needs at least four people. That's an army of about 15,000 volunteers that I can't just assume will exist. Mr Secretary on that note. Is there anything I have not asked that you wanted to add? All clear, Mr Secretary? Thank you for your time.
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Full interview: Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams speaks to Chief National Investigative Correspondent Mark Albert.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams speaks to Chief National Investigative Correspondent Mark Albert.

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