Tips for Nina Turner and her new podcast, Hello Somebody!

Today has been A DAY!

I haven’t had the chance to read all the feedback, but am already overwhelmed with gratitude.

Our episode on #Junteenth got more downloads than expected!

I want everyone to know this journey belongs to US. Thank u for listening!https://t.co/445uCd34em pic.twitter.com/UQ6JglaaW7

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) June 19, 2020

🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉https://t.co/V54ZtgYnOC

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) June 20, 2020

Kentucky braces for possible voting problems in Tuesday’s primary amid signs of high turnout

Fewer than 200 polling places will be open for voters in Kentucky’s primary Tuesday, down from 3,700 in a typical election year. Amid a huge influx in requests for mail-in ballots, some voters still had not received theirs days before they must be turned in. And turnout is expected to be higher than in past primaries because of a suddenly competitive fight for the Democratic Senate nomination.

The scenario has voting rights advocates and some local elections officials worried that the state is careening toward a messy day marked by long lines and frustrated voters — similar to the scenes that have played out repeatedly this spring as the novel coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the 2020 primaries.

Because of a shortage of workers willing to staff voting sites during the health crisis, each of the commonwealth’s 120 counties is opening a very limited number of polling locations. The two largest counties will have just one in-person location each.

On Thursday evening, a federal judge rejected an effort to add polling places in the state’s largest counties, citing a legal standard discouraging last-minute court intervention in election procedures.

That means Jefferson County — the state’s largest, home to 767,000 residents and the city of Louisville — will have as its sole polling location a convention and expo center where voting booths have been set up about eight feet apart in a cavernous hall. About 1 in 5 residents in the county is African American, the largest black population in the state.

In Fayette County, the state’s second-largest county and home to Lexington, voters who want to cast ballots in person will have to head to the football field at the University of Kentucky, where voters will find hand-sanitizing stations and booths where they can fill out paper ballots and scan them through machines.

The pandemic has already altered how tens of millions of Americans can cast their ballots this year

Don Blevins Jr., the Fayette County clerk, said that while he is confident in the county’s plans to accommodate everyone who wants to vote, he is concerned that large numbers could overwhelm staff on site and force voters to wait.

“If we get a massive turnout at Kroger Field, that’s just going to be an angry mob,” Blevins said. “That does worry me a little.”

State officials anticipate a higher turnout than in past presidential primary years, driven in part by a late surge by upstart Senate candidate state Rep. Charles Booker, who is challenging former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath for the Democratic nomination to take on GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the fall.

Booker has secured high-profile endorsements from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) since he recently joined protesters and demonstrated against police brutality in Louisville.

Trepidation about how pandemic-era voting will play out in Kentucky comes on the heels of troubled primaries such as Georgia’s on June 9, when voters waited as long as five hours in line and poll workers struggled to work new voting machines after training sessions had been scrapped because of the pandemic.

Voting debacle in Georgia came after months of warnings went unaddressed

“It’s outrageous that officials are seeking to hold in-person elections in a single location,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “It’s as if Kentucky failed to follow the crisis that unfolded in Wisconsin and Georgia, where officials were woefully unprepared for the turnout on Election Day.”

State and county officials say they have been preparing for the turnout and are doing what they can to head off long lines Tuesday.

Michael G. Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, said his office has been aggressively trying to reach voters through the news media and social media, encouraging them to vote by mail and seeking to reassure those worried that the expansion of mail voting will lead to fraud.

Adams launched an educational campaign around mail-in ballots with the slogan, “Easy to vote, hard to cheat.” The goal is to explain to voters that “absentee voting is a great concept and there are laws in place about how it works,” he said.

“I’m much more concerned about voter confusion than I am about people trying to steal an election,” Adams said.

Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks.

Like many states, Kentucky relaxed the rules of who can vote absentee by applying the “medical emergency” excuse to fear of the coronavirus.

More than 937,000 voters requested early ballots as of Wednesday, or 27 percent of all registered voters in the state, Adams said.

That is a big spike from previous primary elections when there was a narrower criteria for mail-in voting. About 1.5 percent of registered voters typically vote by mail, according to the secretary of state’s office, or about 51,000 voters.

Adams said he still has concerns about whether the voter education effort has successfully reached rural counties.

It couldn’t be clearer: We do NOT trust our for-profit healthcare system. #MedicareForAll #PoliticalRevolutionhttps://t.co/dx9IfxwZeb

— Our Revolution (@OurRevolution) June 20, 2020