Amidst an ongoing audit regarding the accessibility of the county’s polling places, the Kenton County Board of Elections confirmed the Northern Kentucky Convention Center as a polling place and voted to relocate several others on Monday.
Specifically, the board voted to confirm the convention center as a polling place for both early voting and Election Day voting while also moving to ask the county fiscal court for money to buy additional equipment to stock the voting sites.
The locations they voted to move were the Fort Wright Civic Club, the Crescent Springs City Building and School House Bees, a private honey business in Covington. They will be moved to Fort Wright Elementary, the Crescent Springs Fire House and Ryland Heights Elementary, respectively. Additionally, the board voted to investigate another site, the Lookout Heights Civic Club in Fort Wright, for possible relocation.
Several other sites—the Gardens of Park Hills (an event space), River Ridge Elementary, the Elsmere Senior Center, the Ludlow Community Center and Beechgrove Elementary—were also up for potential relocation, but the board voted against relocating them for various reasons.
The board had submitted a preliminary voting plan with the expectation of making amendments in July. The state board of elections will now need to sign off on the changes before a final voting plan can be furnished.
Monday’s votes were contextualized by the Department of Justice’s ongoing audit of the county’s polling places following a citizen complaint in 2022. The complaint alleged a lack of accessibility for people with disabilities at some of the county’s voting sites. Following the complaint, Kenton County entered into a consent decree with the DOJ to survey and provide accommodations at the polling places throughout the county.
Surveys assess the buildings for handicapped accessibility. For those buildings flagged as inaccessible, the county must either relocate them or provide accommodations to help people with mobility issues get inside and move around safely. These could include measures like adding temporary ramps, placing mats on uneven ground for wheelchairs and changing entry points. Ideally, such accommodations would bring the polling sites into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. The county signed the consent decree in January of last year, and it lasts for three years.
A representative from the DOJ did not attend Monday’s meeting, but Gabe Summe, Kenton County’s clerk and chair of the board of elections, said the department was trying to persuade the county to relocate seven polling sites that had been flagged as inaccessible. Frequently, this arose from excessive slopes and other obstacles leading from parking areas to building entryways.
The problem, the board members agreed, was that relocating some of the sites could create voting gaps, wherein some of the smaller communities in the county would be without any polling sites nearby. The relocation of the polling site at River Ridge Elementary, for instance, would leave most Villa Hills residents without an in-person polling place.
The proximity to the general election, one with two constitutional amendments and a presidential race no less, granted the county some leeway to say ‘no,’ Kenton County Attorney Stacy Tapke argued.
“I don’t think they’re gonna tell you [that] you can’t use those sites,” Tapke said, “if you go back and say, ‘Look, we just can’t. It’s too close to the election, it’s too big, it’s too important.'”
The board’s Democratic Party representative, Bryce Rhoades, agreed.
“I think, just practically, it would be a nightmare,” Rhoades said.
Much of the reasoning behind casting votes against relocating mirrored these arguments, although the board members agreed that changes could be made before the next major election when the county had more time to consider alternatives.
The sites that the board did decide to relocate either had ready alternatives nearby or were deemed as being hazardous to the health of the poll workers.
The Crescent Spring City building, for instance, has thick carpet, which could conceivably make wheel chair accessibility difficult, but the Crescent Springs Fire House is just down the road and lacks many of the accessibility problems of the city building.
Then, there was the Fort Wright Civic Club, which served as a polling place for a long time. The building was donated to the city in March, and a team of consultants who came in to inspect the building found numerous structural problems with it, such as a general lack of ADA compliance, no hot water and a black mold infestation. The board didn’t think allowing the poll workers to sit in a such a building all day would be safe.
“I don’t know if we can have people for 12 hours in a building that has black mold,” Summe said.
The Lookout Heights Civic Club in Fort Wright meanwhile reeks with foul odors and other purportedly unsanitary working conditions, according to poll workers who’ve been there, Summe said. The board members, however, had not been out to the site to investigate it personally, so they deferred a decision on that site until they could do so.
Finally, the location at the site of School House Bees, a private honey company in Covington, was moved because of all the bees.
Summe will turn in a revised election plan to the state and updated forms and decisions to the DOJ this week. The complete election plan will be available on the Kentucky Secretary of State’s website after Aug. 20. Signs will be posted on the former polling place locations, and the county will update its website once the state affirms the final voting plan.
The next meeting of the Kenton County Board of Elections is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, starting at 8 a.m. at the Kenton County Government Center on Simon Kenton Way in Covington.