Mike Wolanin | The Republic Stickers with the message “I Voted Today” are laid out on a table at the start of early voting at NexusPark in Columbus on Oct. 16.
With less than a week before the polls open, the turnout of early voters in Columbus for the municipal election appears to be larger than last year.
On Saturday, a total of 108 votes were cast in Columbus, Bartholomew County Clerk Shari Lentz said. Of those, 18 ballots were cast at the Bartholomew County Governmental Office building at Third and Franklin streets, while 90 people voted at Nexus Park, she said. As of the end of Saturday, there were just under 1,200 voters who had cast their ballots early.
But if the last municipal election was any indication, most voters will come out at the last minute, right up until 6 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 7. Contested city council races, as well as the election of a new mayor, may have generated above-average interest in Columbus, Bartholomew County Commissioner Tony London said.
During the municipal election of 2019, voter turnout was at 24.65% in Columbus, according to Taylor Seegraves of the Bartholomew County Voter Registration office. A total of 7,306 voters cast ballots in the 2019 general election out of a total of 29,633 city residents eligible to vote.
”But compared to presidential elections, the turnout (for municipal elections) is low because the races only involve the Columbus area,” Bartholomew County Commissioner Larry Kleinhenz said. “Without the national interest, public interest wanes”.
While most incorporated smaller towns in Indiana have moved their local elections to the mid-terms, a city the size of Columbus is required by law to maintain exclusively municipal elections a year before the presidential election, Lentz said.
Since the 2024 presidential election will be extremely important to many residents, Lentz said she is seeking two grants through the office of Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales.
The county will be asking for $9,100 to pay for Verizon Wireless hotspots, which are intended to provide more seamless portable Wi-Fi connections to ensure the electronic poll books’ connections are secure, Lentz said. But she added that some of the purchased hotspots are not working as well as they should.
“We’ll be fine this year with only eight (voting centers) next week,” Lentz said. “But when we have a countywide election, we’re going to need all of our hotspots.”
Election officials have long stressed that there is no direct internet access to voting machines, preserving an election’s integrity.
The clerk’s budget for next year includes sufficient funding to purchase at least eight new poll pads, which are essentially i-Pads with appropriate software.
Finally, Lentz said she will seek $5,591 to pay high school seniors and others to be greeters at each voting center next year, so they can assist voters while election inspectors are taking care of their sizable responsibilities.
“My thought was to pay them, because the Indiana Secretary of State’s office has a program called ‘Hoosier Hallpass’,” Lentz said. “It’s for counties that can’t recruit enough poll workers, so they pay 16 and 17-year-old seniors to work the polls with teacher and parental approval.”
Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. Assistant Superintendent Chad Phillips said he has no objections to high school seniors taking the day off from classes and being paid to serve as greeters.
