Incumbent Kenton County Clerk Gabrielle Summe faces one challenger, Danny Whitacre, in the Republican primary on May 17. Summe has been the Kenton County Clerk for the past 12 years. She was first elected to the office in 2010.
Gabrielle Summe (R)
In 2010, Summe became the first female county Clerk elected to office in the history of Kenton County.
“I am running for reelection because I have put a lot of things in place, I’ve changed a lot of programs in place and they’re working well, but I know I can make them better,” Summe said.
Summe is a graduate of Xavier University holding a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in public relations/communications. She has a law degree from Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law.
She worked in the Kenton County Attorney’s Office as the director of Kenton County Child Support for approximately eight years, then as the assistant Kenton County attorney for nine years.
“Over the years, a lot has changed and we’ve been able to change with the law,” Summe said. “One of the key things I’ve been super proud of is when the Pandemic shut the world down, we did not shut down. We continued to be very innovative in how we were able to help the public.”
When people couldn’t come into the Kenton County Government Center, Summe said she and her staff found creative ways to still get residents a way to get their business done, such as hosting video calls in order to get resident’s notarizations done.
“We found ways to Facetime to get marriage licenses done,” Summe said. “We found ways to create appointments so we could mask up and have people come in. We found ways to make sure our attorneys could access the record room by establishing an appointment system. We were able to make sure that we converted our people to being able to renew items over the phone. We also worked with the state to offer more online services.”
Summe said she is super proud of her staff for being adaptable throughout unprecedented circumstances. Her office put programs in place to reduce the length of lines for the clerk’s office, and make the office run more efficiently overall while providing the public with more convenience.
“I’m really proud of what we were able to accomplish, not only unique to Kenton County as far as our text queue, but also working with the state and our fellow counties to help accommodate the citizens, whether they were in Kenton County or even Boone and Campbell,” Summe said.
Summe said she is currently in the process of digitizing and indexing all real estate records in Kenton County dating back to 1840. This will help make the office much more user friendly.
“I am committed to continuing to advance our long term projects, but also continuing to find ways to streamline our office that make it easier for the public to use,” Summe said. “I truly believe this is the business office of the citizens, and it should be something that they can use so that it’s not a complicated process.”
Danny Whitacre (R)
Summe’s challenger is Danny Whitacre, a native of Newport and veteran of the United States 82nd Airborne and 1st Psychological Operations.
Whitacre is a graduate of NKU, holding a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Marketing with a concentration in Honors Education.
“I’ve had dozens and dozens of professional executive level trainings, including a certification as a Master in Design Thinking from Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management,” Whitacre said.
Whitacre’s campaign is focused on making visits to the Kenton County Courthouse more efficient, performing office’s required duties, and ensuring election integrity.
“On the day before you were allowed to actually declare as a candidate, I convinced myself that somebody needed to challenge the status quo and get in here and find out what’s going on with elections,” Whitacre said.
The issue Whitacre said he is most focused on is ensuring election integrity in Kenton County.
“The key to living in a non-violent society is trust in elections. I have no trust that Kenton County has an election system that would stand the scrutiny of a Forensic Audit,” Whitacre said in an op-ed submitted to LINK nky. “In fact, I cannot believe the state of our county’s voter registration rolls. Today, our Clerk claims we have 142,154 registered voters, but our county has only 129,000 people eligible to vote.”
On his campaign website, Whitace said he isn’t convinced that Kenton County has accurate voter registration rolls, accurate vote counts, and says Kenton County lacks election transparency.
“Like most Americans, I just assumed our elections are fairly and accurately executed… and I thought the results accurately reflect the will of the people,” Whitacre said on his campaign website.
Whitacre also said he wants to modernize the clerk’s office procedures to make them more efficient. He described wanting to make going to the clerk’s office an enjoyable experience. Whitacre said he wants to tweak the systems in place at the Kenton County Clerk’s office to make them faster, better, and cheaper. Whitacre says his career experience as a high tech IT recruiter will help him identify problems quicker, and find solutions that work for everyone.
“I want to make incremental improvements in the way we transact business with the public,” Whitacre said.
One update Whitacre proposes is updating the operating hours of the Clerk’s office.
“What’s the magic of operating between 7 a.m. and 4 p.m.? I don’t know the magic,” Whitacre said. “I would like to do some prototypes. Maybe talk to a couple of people who would like to sleep in, late and not come in at 7 or 8 or 9 and say, ’hey, would you like to do from 10 p.m. and stay until 7 a.m. and you know, take that back half of the day,’ and just prototype that a little bit.”
Election integrity in Kenton County
Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams has asserted on multiple occasions that there was no voter fraud in Kentucky during the 2020 election.
“Kentuckians should trust the election officials and the thousands of our poll workers – both Democrats and Republicans – who actually run our elections, not the people who sell tickets to shows offering ‘evidence’ but do not provide it to election officials or law enforcement,” Adams told LINK nky’s Mark Payne.
In the 2020 election, Republican incumbent President Donald Trump won Kenton County convincingly, defeating Democrat Joe Biden with 48,129 to 32,371 votes. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that 100 percent of the votes were counted in Kenton County.
On Whitacre’s campaign website, he said, “If we, the people don’t like what’s going on, we usually wait patiently, then go out to the polls and make changes in our representatives: local, state and federal. But, what do you do when a desperate group of people stop being honorable and start conspiring to alter the results of elections? You lose your voice; they disenfranchise us in order to gain power over us. I believe it is plausible that our county’s most recent election saw fraud. In fact, I now wonder how long have our elections been corrupt? How long have our local leaders stood by and just watched?”
The Kenton County Clerk and the County Board of Elections oversees countywide elections. Summe disputes the characterization that the state of Kentucky and Kenton County have insecure elections.
“I know that my bipartisan Elections Board is super committed, and knows how important elections are,” Summe told LINK nky. “We make sure that election integrity is intact for Kenton County. Your elections are secure.”
Summe emphasized the fact that just because someone is on the voter roll doesn’t automatically mean that fraud has been committed. Summe also said that relying on Census data doesn’t tell the full story because many residents don’t fill out the Census. This problem was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which arose at the same time as the data collection for the 2020 US Census.
“There are rules and laws that I must follow. I can’t just remove somebody wholeheartedly just to make the voter rolls sit at a certain number,” Summe said. “That would be scary if the county clerk had the power to remove people, just because I thought they moved.”
Summe said the state of Kentucky has put countless security protocols in place to ensure election security, and that Kentucky has codified those protocols into law. According to Summe, voting drop boxes are under video surveillance and voting equipment is surveilled by a recorded video feed. After the voting equipment is done being used on Election Day, the area is quarantined where the equipment will sit for 60 days under video surveillance.
“If you talk too broadly about something to try and scare people, I think that kind of non-specific complaint, or proof, true proof, that there is fraud, that it really is a disservice to those who vote and who put on the elections because it is safe,” Summe said. “Can you make it perfect? I don’t know of anything that’s perfect. You have a lot of humans who make this process work.”
Summe said Kenton County is in a pilot program for Risk Limiting Audits which is bipartisan post election auditing legislation.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a post election audit checks that the voting equipment and procedures used to count votes worked properly, and that an election yielded the correct outcome.
“We’ve always audited here,” Summe said. “We have ballot accountability. We just never called them audits. We have always done those things that were required by the state. If there’s more things required by the state, that’s fine, we’ll do them too.”
