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. 

Kelsey Hayes Coots is a Democrat running for Auditor of Public Accounts.

Coots is currently an eighth grade teacher at Jefferson County Public Schools, but she was born and raised in Owensboro. She began her teaching career in Houston, Texas, where she says she realized the struggles that many public education systems are facing all over the country and home in Kentucky.

“I came to Jefferson County and I realized that really our issues here, and our problems and what our students and families are facing here are not so far away as I thought previously,” she said. “I thought Houston is such an urban area, that’s not what we deal with in Kentucky, but I realized that really they are the same. And this has become very personal for me because this isn’t Texas, this is Kentucky where I was born and raised and this is my home.”

Coots decided to run for state auditor because of her background as a teacher.

“I look at the role of state auditor through a lens of a teacher,” she said. “In a revenue strapped state like Kentucky, one dollar that is wasted to inefficiency or corruption, or abuse is one that doesn’t go to those 125 kids that are in my classroom every day, and kids that are just like them across the commonwealth.”

If elected, Coots says she would work to bring transparency to the office.

“I believe that any taxpayer should be able to access the audits, or the information that the auditor does and if they wanted to look and go say ‘hey, is my government spending my money in good faith?’” she said. ”You should be able to access that.”

Coots says with that in mind, she would “audit the auditor’s office” to find where inefficiencies lie and make the website more navigable. There are various ways to this Coots say, including creating a system to send audits directly to taxpayers.

“Right now the way they are just hyperlinked on audits released by date, and it’s again, if you want to spend your free time getting on the auditors website to look for audits, it’s extremely hard to navigate,” Coots said, “As an office  that is based in transparency and accountability, the office itself should be transparent and accountable to all taxpayers.”

Coots would also like to expand the SAFE-House Program, which allows people to anonymously report waste, fraud or abuse anywhere they think it be occurring.

“Anywhere you go in a place that receives taxpayer dollars, that could be for example the fiscal court, that information should be readily available for people,” she said. “I also think there should be PSA’s that go out, not anything that says the auditor’s name because I believe that would be spending taxpayer dollars for something maybe too political, but it should just let people know that that service is there.”

While Kentucky is continuing to trend more Republican, Coots says if she’s the nominee she believes she can flip the seat.

“We’ve found a lot of people be excited about me as a candidate, just because I’m a younger, and I’m a newer face, and I have a new perspective,” she said. “I believe that this race is about that. It’s about choosing someone who has an impactful vision for the auditor’s office that is a passionate watch dog versus a rubber stamp.”

Coots doesn’t think Auditor Mike Harmon hasn’t lived up to the weight of the office.

“I think the current auditor is asleep at the wheel,” she said. “Yes, he kind of goes through the motions, like I said earlier, this about choosing someone who has an impactful vision versus somebody who goes through the motions, and is sort of a rubber stamp. I think he kind of checked the boxes, but we are lacing that passion, lacking that vision.”

Coots is running against Sheri Donahue and Chris Tobe in the primary.