Gabe Summe, the Kenton County clerk and chair of the Board of Elections, has asked Kenton County leaders to help her in quelling confusion that might arise from the way county voting precincts are divided up and made public.
The problem, Summe told the Kenton County Mayors Group on Saturday, arises from the fact that there are numerous homes in the county that are bisected by the county’s many city boundaries. For example, there are about 20 homes in the county that are split between Villa Hills and Crescent Springs, she pointed out.
The county property valuation administrator’s office determines where such homes are taxed based on where the occupants’ sleep. If the bedroom in the home is on one side, that’s where the owners’ are taxed. The board of elections has typically followed suit because, as Summe said, “no taxation without representation,” although she admitted there was no law that mandated this.
This can become confusing for several reasons. Firstly, the information on the deeds of the properties may not match how they’re divided up for voting and taxes. What’s more, it can be difficult to keep everything organizers for officials at the state level. In fact, Summe said that this year the county is sending its own mapping data to the state, rather than the other way around as the differences between the state and county voting maps can lead to confusion.
“Some of those people were completely in one city over another, not cut in half like our [maps], and so we coded them to vote somewhere else, and they walked in with their tax bills and said, ‘We want to vote for this, because this is where we pay taxes,” Summe said as an example from the past.
“Our lines don’t match their lines, and my fear is that just makes it so confusing for the citizens,” Summe said.
To that end, Summe asked the mayors to consider possible solutions to this quandary, although it was unlikely to be resolved before this year’s general election. She pitched the idea of annexing split properties completely into one city or another, but Independence Mayor Chris Reinersman pointed out that it was “virtually impossible to do nonconsensual annexation, so we would have to have each of those property owners ask us.”
Annexation occurs when a city absorbs property formerly outside of its boundaries into its boundaries. Reinersman’s comment referenced Senate Bill 141, which passed in 2023 and curtailed the ability of cities to annex land along their borders. As it stands, property owners must ask to be annexed into a city’s borders in order for it to occur, and this would be need to be taken into account before annexation could be considered as a general solution to the board of elections’ problem.
Confusions about mapping can also lead to issues of voter privacy, Summe said, as it could create precincts with only a single voter, effectively making that person’s vote public.
Summe concluded by asking the mayors to consider possible solutions moving forward.
Final ballots for the November general election will be available to the public in mid September.