Not far away: Local election officials prepare for November

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Bartholomew County election officials are preparing for the COVID-19 pandemic to last through the fall, drawing up plans to prevent the spread of the virus from disrupting the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Right now, local election officials are analyzing building layouts as they scout potential polling sites in the county to reduce the chance voters and poll workers contract and spread coronavirus, said Bartholomew County Clerk Jay Phelps. And they are planning how they would count what they believe will likely be another record-setting number of votes being cast through the mail, Phelps said.

This year’s presidential primary, which was pushed back four weeks to June 2 due to the pandemic, was the first election in Indiana to feature widespread mail-in balloting after state election officials allowed “no excuse” mail-in absentee voting, meaning voters did not need to provide an excuse for why they couldn’t vote in person.

A record 8,313 Bartholomew County voters cast their ballots by mail in the primary — 12.5 times more than the 660 mail-in votes in the 2016 presidential primary, according to county records.

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Local election officials, however, are anticipating that more mail-in ballots will be cast in the fall than in the primary, even if coronavirus infections in the community maintain their current levels and state officials do not extend no-excuse absentee voting to the fall.

“We are already beginning to plan for the presidential (election),” Phelps said. “We do anticipate a similar atmosphere with COVID, even if a second wave doesn’t come. … I can easily see it being 12,000 or 13,000 (mail-in votes) and maybe even a little bit more than that, especially if there is a second wave. If there is a second wave, I think you can easily put those numbers at 16,000 to 20,000 votes by mail.”

By comparison, there were a total of 10,138 mail-in votes cast in Bartholomew County in the past five presidential elections combined, county records show.

Phelps said he hopes to roughly double the number of people available to count mail-in votes, but even then, the influx in mail-in votes could slightly delay the results on election night. It took him and his team roughly 12 hours this past primary election day to process and count all 8,313 mail-in ballots.

“It took an army to pull off what happened in the primary and to be able to count that many (mail-in) votes,” Phelps said. “…My goal is always to try to get results in as efficiently and effectively as possible, and we’ve been able to do that up to this point. But it’s really going to depend on where things are with the virus as of September and October and the increase (in mail-in ballots), especially that final week before the deadline. We were getting hundreds each day in that final week before the primary.”

The pandemic, which has killed at least 128,100 people in the United States, including at least 44 in Bartholomew County, has left election officials scrambling to take unprecedented safety measures to avoid spreading the virus at polling places this year. Those efforts have included expanding vote-by-mail efforts and amassing stockpiles of personal protective equipment.

A shortage of poll workers has further complicated matters, prompting election administrators to scale back polling locations.

In Bartholomew County, election officials reduced the number of in-person voting locations for this year’s primary from 16 to eight after nearly half of poll workers dropped out.

But more polling places may be needed to handle higher turnout likely in the fall general election. A total of 33,198 votes were cast in Bartholomew County in the 2016 general election, compared to 22,448 in the primary, according to county records.

Phelps, however, said he does not think there will be enough poll workers to have 16 vote centers in Bartholomew County this fall, but is aiming to have at least 12.

But with just over 90 days left until early in-person voting is set to begin, much is still up in the air, with local election officials “waiting on the state and both state (political) parties to agree on how to proceed with the election,” Phelps said.

“As of right now, we’ve not heard anything from the state,” Phelps said. “…For us, what’s most pertinent in the next coming weeks is deciding where these (voting) locations are going to be, how many are we going to have and start having the parties recruit poll workers.”

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