One-stop voting schedule announced
By Steve Herring
Published in News on July 25, 2018 5:50 AM
One-stop early voting hours and sites have been announced for the Nov. 6 general election.
One-stop voting will begin Oct. 17, and be available at the Wayne County Public Library, 1001 E. Ash St.; room 104 in the Walnut Building on the campus of Wayne Community College, 3000 Wayne Memorial Drive; Mar Mac Pointe, 200 H Genoa Crossing Drive; and the Mount Olive Train Depot, 110 W. Main St., Mount Olive.
Voting dates and times will be 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays Oct. 17 to 19, Oct. 22 to 26 and Oct. 29 to Nov. 2; 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 27; 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 28; and 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 3.
The phones are already ringing with people asking about absentee ballots and registration drives, Wayne County Elections Director Dane Beavers said.
The extra day and added hours of daily operation will put a strain on the elections office because of additional poll workers and overtime that will be needed, Beavers said.
During the last legislative session, state lawmakers increased early voting from 17 days to 18 days.
"The big catch was that every site has to have the same schedule," Beavers said. "So it doesn't matter if you have one site or 10 sites, they have to be on the same schedule, and the schedule was mandated Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
"That's 12 hours of voting, and then once you add on the 30 minutes getting ready to open and the 30 minutes to an hour of work that is done after you close, now you are up to 13-to-14-hour days."
Eighteen days of working 13 hours a day are going to add up quickly, putting the elections office well over the number of hours it has ever done before, he said.
It seems the rules are changed every election, Beavers said.
"We had a 10-day period," he said. "It was flexible. You could do your own schedule as long as you had a minimum number of hours. Then they moved us to 17 days, but it was still flexible.
"Let's say for example, Fremont. I could open a site in Fremont, put four people in there and vote four or five hours a day and get everybody in Fremont voted easily during a 10-day period just because there are only about 200 registered voters."
That makes sense since it is a smaller group of people, less hours, and the elections office could tailor its sites for the logistics of the area it was trying to target, Beavers said.
"Now that it's mandated, it doesn't matter," he said. "I'm going to Mount Olive where I don't get a really big turnout down there, but we vote in Mount Olive, and we always vote at the train depot. We were able to tailor their hours to meet the needs of that town.
"But now we are going to do 7 (a.m.) to 7 (p.m.) for 18 days. Now, weekends, we still have some flexibility. We don't have to be open the full 12 hours on weekends, but whatever we do at one site, we have to do at all the sites."
That takes away the flexibility, Beavers said.
"It adds to the cost -- a tremendous addition to cost because now we are talking about overtime hours where people are going to get time and a half," he said. "It takes us to a price range between $15,000 and $20,000 for each site."
Beavers said his complete budget for early voting is $40,000 -- the cost of operating two sites under the new rules.
The elections board wants four sites, he said.
"I have got to find a way to squeeze four sites out of $40,000 from a range of $15,000 to $20,000 per site," Beavers said. "So that is going to take a little miracle.
"The county has assured me if we need some extra monies, it will try to help us out. But we are going to try and make it work with what we have got."
The unfunded mandate from legislators was handed down just a week after his budget was adopted, Beavers said.
As such, Beavers said he hates to ask Wayne County commissioners for more money.
"These things happen, and they are out of our control," he said. "We are required by law to do it. We are going to make it happen. We want to serve the voters of Wayne County the best way that we can. A lot of places, their first reaction was to reduce the number of sites in order to keep the cost in check, but it's hard because of the way Wayne County is.
"You have Mount Olive way down there all by themselves and then you have Fremont on the other side of town. So it is hard to say we are going to open one site at the library downtown and everybody just has to drive there."
That would reduce turnout and disrupt the entire idea of early voting, Beavers said.
The goal is to have locations within a reasonable driving distance of as many voters as possible, he said.
It is hard to justify putting a site where there are not many people to vote, Beavers said, which means that there will be areas that will not get good coverage.
Beavers said he welcomes ideas for possible sites.
They must be Americans with Disabilities Association accessible, have good parking -- around 50 spaces -- and be at least 1,000 square feet.
For now, Beavers is looking for temporary help.
"We are really looking for anybody interested in working the early voting schedule or just election day," Beavers said. "If you go to our website, waynevotes.com, there is a form there you can print and email it to us, or mail it to us or drop it by.
"We are going to need extra folks this cycle because of the extended hours, and we are also trying to do this where you work two (hours) on and two off. We are going to be shifting folks in and out, and we are going to be very flexible because we know how hard it is to work that any hours."
For more information, call 919-731-1411, visit the website, waynevotes.com or go by the office at 309 E. Chestnut St.