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Kentucky ballot · Nov. 3, 2026Checked Nov. 6, 2026

1 statewide measure on the ballot.

One statewide measure was on Kentucky's Nov. 3, 2026 ballot: Constitutional Amendment 1, on the governor's pardon power. The Secretary of State's 2026 Constitutional Amendments page shows this one amendment, and the county sample ballots posted by the Secretary of State show no other statewide question. Under Section 256 of the Kentucky Constitution, amendments come from a regular session and go to voters at the next general election for House members, so the 2025 and 2026 regular sessions are the ones that could feed this ballot. Of the 72 bills and resolutions under the Legislative Research Commission's "Constitution, Ky." index heading for those two sessions, only Senate Bill 10 (2026) proposes an amendment and shows passage by both chambers; the rest stopped short of that, were withdrawn, or are resolutions that propose no amendment. Local questions, such as Lexington-Fayette's charter amendments and local alcohol or tax questions, appear on some county ballots and are not covered here. This page gives no vote totals.

Constitutional Amendment 1 · Legislative constitutional amendment

AN ACT proposing to amend Section 77 of the Constitution of Kentucky relating to limiting the Governor's ability to grant pardons and commute sentences.

A yes vote would bar a governor from granting pardons or commuting sentences from 60 days before a gubernatorial election through the fifth Tuesday after it, a stretch the ballot question describes as ending when the governor is sworn in. Outside that stretch the power would stay as it is, and the other changes reorganize Section 77 into numbered parts and replace male pronouns with gender-neutral wording.

Passes with: A majority of the votes cast for and against the amendment; the governor's approval is not needed (Kentucky Constitution, Section 256).

Official ballot summary (the state’s text)

Are you in favor of limiting a Governor's ability to grant pardons or commute sentences by prohibiting him or her from granting pardons or commuting sentences during the time period beginning 60 days prior to the general election at which the Governor is elected, and ending when the Governor is sworn in for that term by amending the Constitution of Kentucky as stated below? It is proposed that Section 77 of the Constitution of Kentucky be amended to read as follows: (1) The Governor shall have power to: (a) Remit fines and forfeitures; and (b) Commute sentences and grant reprieves and pardons, except: 1. In case of impeachment; or 2. For the period beginning sixty days prior to the date of the gubernatorial election and ending the fifth Tuesday succeeding the election. (2) The Governor shall file with each application therefor a statement of the reasons for his or her decision thereon, which application and statement shall always be open to public inspection. (3) In cases of treason, the Governor shall have power to grant reprieves until the end of the next session of the General Assembly, in which the power of pardoning shall be vested; but he or she shall have no power to remit the fees of the Clerk, Sheriff or Commonwealth's Attorney in penal or criminal cases.

Official fiscal summary

The costs of SB 10 GA to local governments due to adding a constitutional amendment to a ballot would be minimal.

From the Legislative Research Commission's Local Government Mandate Statement dated Feb. 2, 2026, which covers county costs of putting the amendment on the ballot and was written before the House removed the bill's change to Section 240. It is not an estimate of the amendment's effects; no state fiscal summary of the measure itself was found.

No primarily formed committees found in state records.

Sources: Kentucky Secretary of State, 2026 Constitutional Amendments (official text); Full text.

What is not here yet

  • No signed certification from the Secretary of State to the county clerks was found, and proof of the required newspaper publication was not checked. The wording rests on the Secretary of State's page, Acts ch. 12 and the posted sample ballots.
  • Sample ballots: 120 PDFs for 119 counties were read through their embedded text, which is machine-read from page images and contains errors. The question matched exactly in 88; the rest were too garbled for an exact match, including 8 near matches, and were confirmed by searching for the amendment's wording, with Breathitt and Floyd checked by eye because their text layer had none of it. Jefferson County's ballot is on the clerk's address lookup, not in a PDF, and was not opened.
  • Some county ballots may differ in small punctuation from the state's text: Adair's machine-read text shows a comma after "Sheriff" in Section 77 that the Secretary of State's page and Acts ch. 12 do not have. County ballots were not compared character by character; the official text here is the state's.
  • The Legislative Research Commission index was the checklist for proposed amendments, and each of its 72 entries was opened. A proposed amendment indexed only under another heading would not be on that list, though the Secretary of State's page and the ballots show no other. The 2025 index page was last updated July 24, 2025, and the 2026 page Aug. 19, 2026.
  • Committees: the Registry's Issue Committee export (399 rows, pulled Nov. 6, 2026) has no committee tied to this amendment and no row at all with a 2026 election date; its latest is Nov. 25, 2025. That covers registered committees only. The Registry says groups of three or more that take in or spend more than $1,000 to advocate on a ballot measure may have to register, so smaller efforts may not appear. Because the export shows no 2026 committee for any measure, local ones included, a lag in the Registry's records cannot be ruled out. The Registry's 30-day post-General report is not due until Dec. 14, 2026.
  • Court challenges: not yet checked in Kentucky court records, whose docket system was not searched. Web searches and a CourtListener search on Nov. 6, 2026 surfaced no suit over this amendment, which is not the same as saying none exists.
  • The ballot question ends the period when the governor is sworn in; the amended section ends it on the fifth Tuesday after the election. This page gives both as written and did not establish from the constitution whether the two dates always coincide.
  • Official results: not yet checked. Statewide questions other than constitutional amendments: none appears on the Secretary of State's page or the ballots read; no separate state list of such questions was found.

Gaps in the ballot records as of the date checked.