Kentucky ballot order set for Perry County races

Perry County voters can already check the clerk’s election center and sample ballot page in Hazard as the 2026 ballot takes shape. Kentucky law sets the order of names for regular-election district, circuit and numbered-division races by lot in the Secretary of State’s office in Frankfort at 2 p.m. on the Thursday after the first Tuesday after the first Monday in June, and that order cannot be changed once it is set.

For Perry County, that matters most in the races where voters are least likely to stop and study every line. Local offices, judicial seats and board positions can be easy to miss on a crowded ballot, and the name that appears higher up can get more attention from people flipping through sample ballots or marking choices quickly. The Perry County Clerk’s Office already posts an election center and a sample ballot page online, including a file labeled 2026P-Newspaper-Composite.pdf that shows how the county’s ballot layout is being organized.

The county’s candidate list includes Wayne Napier for county clerk and Derek Jorge Campbell for county attorney, both Republicans. Other county races already in circulation include Scott Alexander for county judge/executive and candidates such as Donald Miller in Magistrate District 1 and Rose Shields in Magistrate District 2. As those names move from filing paperwork to the ballot, the order they occupy can affect visibility in the races Perry County residents are most likely to scan quickly.

The timing is already built into Kentucky’s election calendar. The earliest date for affixing signatures on 2026 candidate filing forms was Nov. 5, 2025, and county clerks must transmit a candidate’s information to the Secretary of State within five business days of receiving nomination papers. That timeline helps explain why ballot placement becomes one of the first fixed markers of an election cycle that is still filling out.

The county is not alone in treating ballot order as an important step. Scott County’s clerk’s office has publicly posted about a general-election ballot-position drawing, and Jefferson County Clerk David Yates has described the drawing as an open and transparent step in the election process. Statewide, the 2026 primary drew attention as more than 2,572 positions went on the ballot in Kentucky, with the open U.S. Senate race after Mitch McConnell said he would step down adding to the political noise around the cycle.

Perry County’s ballot may be local, but its order is now set by a statewide rule that leaves little room for change once the names are placed. For voters in Hazard and across the county, the next stop is the sample ballot.