Six days before Gov.-elect Andy Beshear’s inauguration, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said on several radio shows Wednesday morning that he lost reelection because of liberals’ success in “harvesting votes” in urban areas, which is illegal.
Bevin, who asked for a recanvass of the 2019 gubernatorial election results and made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Jefferson and Fayette counties before conceding the race, said he received 38% more votes than he had when he won his first term in 2015.
But he said he had trouble winning the race because of how the left increased voter turnout in cities like Louisville and Lexington.
Liberals are “very good at harvesting votes in densely populated urban areas,” Bevin said in one interview.
Across at least three radio interviews, Bevin used the word “harvest” or an iteration of it several times.
It is unclear exactly what Bevin is referring to with his use of the word. Ballot harvesting, or collecting and submitting absentee or mail-in voter ballots by volunteers or workers, is illegal in Kentucky.
Ballot harvesting occurred in a 2018 midterm race for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District that featured Republican Mark Harris against Democrat Dan McCready. Bevin previously mentioned this race when alleging voter fraud in the Kentucky gubernatorial election.
North Carolina’s elections board ordered a new election after a political operative working for Harris was accused of leading an effort to illegally collect and turn in absentee ballots.
Citizens for Election Integrity, a recently created group that held a news conference in November to allege election fraud, claimed in a Facebook post Sunday that many precincts in Jefferson County, which Beshear won handily, had “irregular results.”
Specifically, the group pointed to two heavily African American precincts, M110 and M169, where Beshear won 330-0 and 274-2, respectively.
Roughly 90% of registered voters in those precincts, are Democrats. Then presidential Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton crushed then-Republican candidate Donald Trump in both precincts in the 2016 presidential election.
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Written by Ben Tobin. Cross-posted from the
Courier-Journal via the Kentucky Press News Service.