FRANKFORT, Ky. (LEX 18) — Kentucky's Secretary of State has been named the 2024 winner of the JFK Profile in Courage Award. The award is given to public officials who've shown politically courageous leadership. Michael Adams is the 2024 recipient for his work on election integrity.
When Adams took office in January 2020, he said he didn't anticipate being controversial.
"We tightened security, we banned ballot harvesting, we cleaned up our voter rolls for the first time in a long time, we required a photo ID to vote in our elections," Adams said.
After the state allowed expanded early voting during the pandemic, Adams pushed to make that permanent, working to expand voting to Kentuckians in the years since. As the election process became heated later in 2020, Adams said, he began to receive death threats, and his staff was verbally abused. Adams said there was a lot of pushback within his own Republican party, and his position, defending the security of Kentucky's elections and dismissing election deniers, created personal rifts.
"It was a lonely time. I had family members that wouldn't talk to me. I had friends that stopped being my friend. It was a lonely time," he said.
Adams won reelection in 2023 with more than 60% of the vote. As he looks ahead to this year's elections, he never expected this award.
"I'll tell you I was dumbstruck when they called to offer it to me," he said.
Adams thinks that reelection had something to do with it.
"I think the reason that the Kennedy Foundation chose me for the award is not because I made a difficult decision and then got beat or retired. It's because I stayed in the fight and I won," he said.
As Adams prepares for the awards ceremony in June, he hopes others can learn from his experience.
"I think they want to make an example of me and hopefully stiffen up the spines of people around our country who are in difficult positions on other issues," he said.
