As Kentuckians voted today, Attorney General Russell Coleman talked about protecting voting integrity.

It's incredibly important that we have for the opportunity to protect the integrity of the ballot, that we create a mechanism, continue a mechanism of seamless law enforcement coordination to protect that incredible right, that incredible ability for our constitutional system to elect our leaders in free and fair elections.

Behind me, you will see those that are actually doing the work, the prosecutors, investigators from the attorney general's office, the Department of Criminal Investigations, the FBI and the Kentucky State police, colleagues across federal, state and local law enforcement.

What they're doing behind me, as you see, is they're answering the election fraud hotline.

This hotline is for Kentuckians to call in and report suspected election fraud or to address questions that come up the day of a number of the inquiries we've had or just that are inquiries, legal questions that we attempt to address to help Kentuckians in 2022.

A tip to The Hotline about a suspected election law violation in Monroe County, Kentucky, led to the conviction of seven individuals for election crimes.

The last members of this fraud ring were sentenced just earlier this year, just a few months ago.

We want to show Kentuckians that we take election law seriously.

Election fraud seriously.

They can have confidence that our elective process is secure.

Kentucky has secure elections because of common sense, common sense policies that have been enacted in recent years, such as voter I.D..

According to a Pew Research poll just this year, 80% of Americans support common sense voter I.D.. 80% of Americans, Democrats and Republicans, oftentimes were the butt of jokes nationally, particularly when it comes to elections.

Anecdotally, Kentucky is notorious for not being for not providing a system that we're proud of.

Anecdotally, we have a history of vote buying about selling in this commonwealth.

The purpose of bringing these law enforcement agencies together is to deal with what in some communities is a culture, a tradition of that vote being malleable, alien, able in the sense of available to be sold.

We have a history of public corruption in this Commonwealth.

I just talked about seven convictions that were were an outgrowth of this effort in 2022.

So we want to ensure that that that that vote is protected, that that vote has value, that that vote is not purchased somehow by some pecuniary gain or about a pint of whiskey.

And so there are all of those anecdotes we've heard because we've we've seen those as prosecutors.