The primary election is May 21, and there are several candidates seeking their party's nomination. The Pure Politics team has contacted each candidate with a primary opponent to find out who they are, and what they stand for.
Carl Nett is a Republican for Secretary of State.
Nett was born and raised in Louisville, but he also lived in Hardin and Nelson Counties. After 9/11, Nett was hired by the United States Secret Service where he spent six years working on the Presidential Protective Division, traveling around the country and the world. In 2008, he resigned and went to work for the CIA. While working with the CIA, he took on a role in Afghanistan becoming embedded with the special operations forces. In 2011, he led a unit at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. He’s also written a couple books about anthology of United States history in 2013 and he’s currently working on his second book detailing his 9/11 career.
Nett first took a stab at politics in 2014 when he ran for State Representative ultimately coming up short, but says he wants to be secretary of state to help improve Kentucky.
“I’m invested in my home state and I wanted to be an agent of change for the good,” he said.
As secretary of state, he would be the chief election official, this is a role he says goes hand in hand with his experience.
“It’s analogous to my first roll at the Secret Service, we do a lot of things there: Protection, investigations, you screw up an investigation you get yelled at by your boss. You screw up Protection, we lose President Kennedy,” said Nett. “Likewise, in the Secretary of State roll, maintaining free and fair elections and making sure those go smoothly is paramount.”
Nett says there is a crisis when it comes to clearing the voter rolls which leads to voter fraud.
“I know based upon briefings with the bureau that in this past election, in November 2018, voter fraud took place,” he said. “There were people that voted two or more times in Kentucky, people who voted across state lines, so we need to purge the voter rolls. We need to implement photo ID laws for voters.”
To begin the process of clearing the voter rolls, he would look at voters who have been dormant for two federal election cycles and send them a prepaid postage mailer, if the voter doesn’t respond after two years or vote in an election, they will then be removed from the voter rolls.
To keep elections safe in Kentucky he believes bringing uniformity to voting systems, and closing loopholes in county clerk’s offices will help, but there is no way to totally safeguard everything.
“Everything is vulnerable, but there is certainly some common sense safeguards we can bring to the table, and some safeguards that again the agency uses to safeguard their information systems which we can replicate here in Kentucky without much expense actually,” he said.
Nett is the only Republican secretary of state candidate that came out against a bill stripping the secretary of state of power over the State Board of Elections. He says this is because the bill was filed as a reaction to ongoing issues with current Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.
“This is the wrong remedy, if someone breaks the law, if you or I break the law, they don’t change the law, they punish us,” he said. “So, the remedy here was impeachment, but the legislature decided not to purse that. Instead, they fundamentally change the role of this constitutional office. This is no longer the office that I was running for 13, 14 months ago. They kept the title of chief election official, but they stripped a lot of the authorities and responsibilities that came with that.”
Carl Nett first made headlines for a nickname he was going to use on the ballot, “Trump”. Nett had filed for the office as Carl “Trump” Nett, and for several months that was how he was referred to on correspondence from the secretary of state’s office. Nett says he was given that nickname for being an early and vocal support of President Donald Trump. Republican opponent Michael Adams challenged the name appearing on the ballot in the Republican primary, citing it as an unfair advantage. Grimes ultimately agreed with the challenge and removed the nickname from the ballot, but without notifying Nett of this decision this caused him to file a lawsuit against her and opponent Adams.
“I found out as part of the discovery process, that she was working behind the scenes with Mr. Adams to remove my nickname from the ballot,” he said.
Nett is running against Michael Adams, Andrew English and Stephen Knipper in the primary.