Request By:
Mr. Edmus McGeorge
Route #1, Box 273
Pineville, Kentucky 40977
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: Walter C. Herdman, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
As an Election Commissioner for Bell County you raise the following questions:
"1. How to reduce from eight to four magisterial districts?
"2. How to relieve a precinct with over 800 actual voters voted in November 1980 General Election?
"3. How to re-district or solve a problem with a precinct with 3 controlled member board of education districts all running in one precinct? "
In response to your initial question, KRS 67.045 deals with the reapportionment procedure with respect to magisterial districts. Under this statute magisterial districts are to be based on as nearly equal population as possible. However no magisterial district may be reapportioned within 120 days prior to any primary election for the office of justice of the peace and at a minimum, the districts shall be reapportioned within 6 months following the official census reports conducted by the U.S. Government. Of course, commissioners to reapportion the county into not less than three nor more than eight districts are appointed and report their finding to the county clerk. Such report is filed within the time prescribed in subsection (4) to which any citizen may file exceptions and the matter is then placed before the district court.
In response to your second question concerning changing the boundaries of a precinct in which over 800 actual votes were cast in the 1980 general election, we refer you to H.B. 27 which has been coded as KRS 117.057. This statute provides that notwithstanding the provision of KRS 117.055 which sets forth the procedure for changing precinct boundary lines from time to time based on the number of votes cast at the previous election, all current precinct boundaries must be maintained until the termination of the 1982 regular session of the legislature or upon the termination of any extraordinary session which enacts reapportionment and redistricting legislation, which ever shall occur at the earliest date. Thus no precinct boundaries can be changed for whatever reason pursuant to KRS 117.055 until reapportionment legislation has been enacted as previously mentioned.
In response to your third question, school district boundary lines are altered pursuant to the terms of KRS 160.210 but no change can be made more frequently than five years after the last change except in case of merger. Division boundary lines are to be such as to make the division as equal in population as possible and containing intrical voting precincts insofar as is practical. You question would seem to indicate that split precincts exist where there are parts of three divisions within a single precinct. However, as pointed out above, precinct lines cannot be changed at this time or at any time until after reapportionment by the legislature. As a consequence the registration lists, sent to the precinct at any election involving school board members, will have to indicate where such members live so that the election officers can determine in which division they are entitled to vote by locking out the machine.