Polling places will be still be open on election day for those who believe in casting a ballot in person, no matter what.
You won’t vote where you normally do, though. All polling places were moved to schools to comply with social distancing recommendations during the pandemic.
You also won’t vote on the same machines you’re used to. The contract the county had with the provider of those machines expired last year, and the Brown County Election Board chose new machines which we’ll use for the first time here during the primary.
In-person voting is happening all the rest of this week and on Monday, June 1 for those who choose to vote absentee. See the hours and other information by clicking here.
Primary election day is Tuesday, June 2. On that day, polls will be open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
On May 20, the election board conducted the required public test of the voting machines and explained the process voters will go through when they show up to vote in person.
Checking in
Most voters in the county will vote at either Brown County High School (all Hamblen and Jackson Township residents) or Brown County Intermediate School (all Washington Township residents). Van Buren Township voters will vote at Van Buren Elementary.
If you choose to vote in-person absentee (early) this week, you’ll vote at Brown County Intermediate School regardless of where you live in the county.
Masks and gloves will not be provided for voters. If you wish to use them, you’ll need to bring your own; the supplies that came to Brown County from the state are for poll workers. However, hand sanitizer likely will be available for voters to use when they leave, said election board member Mark Williams.
At each location, voters will be asked to space themselves out while waiting for their turn. While you’re waiting, you can look at sample ballots which will list all the candidates on the Democrat and Republican tickets.
When you get to the clerk who will check you in, you’ll need to present your ID to be scanned into the new electronic pollbook. The system will pull up your voter record, which you will verify is yours, and you’ll need to sign the screen.
At check-in, you need to declare if you want a Democrat or a Republican ballot. During a primary you must choose one party; you can only cross over and vote for candidates from more than one party during a general election. If you’re looking to vote for a particular person, make sure you know what party that person is running under. (Check the sample ballot posted near the entrance.)
Once you select which party’s ballot you are taking, you cannot change that selection, explained Janet Buchanan, the technician with RBS, the company that’s providing this voting equipment.
After you check in with the poll clerk, a “ticket” will print out from the pollbook that shows which kind of ballot you chose to receive. You’ll take that with you to the next station, where you’ll receive a ballot.
Casting a ballot
You can choose to use an old-fashioned paper ballot which you’ll fill in with a pen, or you can use a touch-screen machine that’ll print out a receipt showing how you voted.
You can bring your own pen if you wish (black or blue ink only, and no pencils), or a single-use pen will be provided for you.
The touch-screen machine works like a smartphone. You make selections by touching the circle next to the candidate’s name. If you make a mistake, you touch that circle again to unselect it, then you can vote for someone else. You’ll need to scroll through the whole list of candidates; they might not fit all on one screen.
You don’t have to vote for someone for every office. If you skip an office, the ballot scanner will still read your ballot just fine.
If you used the touch-screen machine to vote, you’ll have a chance to recheck your choices on the screen before hitting the “print” button. A receipt-looking piece of paper with a barcode on it will come out of the machine. This is what you’ll take with you to the next station.
If you chose a paper ballot, you’ll take that with you to the next station when you’re done voting.
After you finish voting, if you notice that you’ve made an error on your ballot, you can take your ballot back to the election judge’s table. The judge would then “spoil” the ballot (void it) and you can start the process over again with a clean ballot.
The scanner
The final step in voting is feeding your ballot into the scanner. It looks sort of like a large plastic trash can. It takes a picture of each ballot that goes through the scanner, records the votes onto a thumb drive, and drops the hard copies of the ballots into the locked container below.
At this step, you need to pay attention to which precinct you’re voting in. Multiple precincts are voting in each poll location this year, which is unusual for many Brown County voters.
There will be multiple scanners at each polling place (except for Van Buren, which is one large precinct). If you take your ballot to the wrong scanner — say you’re a Washington 3 voter but you take it to the Washington 4 scanner — it will reject the ballot. You’ll need to take that ballot to the scanner labeled for your precinct for the scanner to accept it.
Depending on which voting method you used — paper or touch screen — you either have a large piece of paper to put into the scanner or you have a receipt-like piece of paper. Those are both ballots, and the scanner will read both types.
You can turn the ballot any direction you want to put it through the scanner and it will still scan, said Brown County Clerk Kathy Smith.
Counting votes
Each ballot scanner is locked with one lock and each ballot bin has two locks on it. The inspectors hold those keys. When polls close at 6 p.m., the scanner lock will be opened and the thumb drive removed from each scanner machine. This will be taken to a central computer set up at Brown County Intermediate School. Vote totals are stored on those thumb drives.
From that central computer, election officials can run and print vote total reports.
Each scanner machine at each polling location also will print vote totals in long, receipt-like tapes. Those tapes can be shared with party officials and with local media in attendance.
The Brown County Democrat will have runners at each building to gather vote totals so that they can be reported on our website, bcdemocrat.com, on election night.
Absentee votes will not be counted until election day. The absentee voter board can start checking and counting those ballots as early as 6 a.m. on June 2, but no results will be released until after polls close at 6 p.m., Smith said.
Mail-in ballots
More mail-in absentee ballots are in play this election than ever before, as the state expanded the option to anyone who wished to vote by mail during the pandemic.
As of May 20, Smith said she’d received close to 900 mail-in ballot requests — more than four times the total of mail-in voters during the last presidential election year.
Mail-in ballots are intended to be mailed in. They must be received by noon on June 2 to be counted as valid ballots. A postmark of June 2 will not count.
However, if you’re not sure if it’s going to make it by mail, you can hand-deliver your ballot to Brown County Intermediate School by noon June 2.
If you change your mind about voting by mail and decide you want to vote in person instead, take your blank mail-in ballot with you to your polling place so that it can be canceled and you can receive a regular ballot.
