Feeling the urgency of election day nearing — or perhaps just wanting to get it over with — at least a quarter of all registered voters in Brown County have already cast their ballots.
As of the evening of Oct. 22, the absentee voter count was 3,211.
There are about 12,000 registered voters in Brown County, county clerk Kathy Smith estimated.
Most of those early votes — 2,297 — were from walk-in voters. Early in-person absentee voting is available to any registered voter until noon Monday, Nov. 2.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]The absentee voter board also had received 914 completed absentee ballots back in the mail as of Thursday.
Voter turnout is already up over the last presidential election in the fall of 2016. Then, 3,027 people opted to vote early.
It’s also up compared to the June 2020 primary overall. In June, only 3,135 people voted total, and 1,395 of them used absentee voting options.
The election board is predicting that about 1,000 more people may mail in ballots or come through the absentee voting office at Deer Run Park before it closes. Absentee voting workers were counting about 200 voters per day last week.
If you haven’t voted yet, here are some things you might want to know.
Masks at polls
Voters will not be required to wear face coverings while at a polling place.
Last week, the Indiana Election Commission issued guidance after county clerks, election workers, election boards and voters raised questions statewide.
County election officials are “encouraged to follow current CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and state department of health guidelines regarding measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19,” the memo read.
However, “these cannot be pre-conditions for a voter,” wrote co-directors J. Bradley King and Angela Nussmeyer.
“To do so would infringe on the federal and state constitutional rights afforded to a voter.”
Even though it’s not required, most voters have been wearing masks anyway while visiting the early voting site at Deer Run, said Julie Cauble and Deb Noe, who’ve been working there nearly every day.
Paper vs. electronic
Brown County switched to primarily paper voting this year when its lease on electronic voting equipment was up. This new system involves voters marking a paper ballot with a pen or marker, then feeding it into an electronic reader which records and tabulates the votes.
The county also offers a touch-screen voting machine at each voting location, but that is supposed to be reserved for people who are disabled and have trouble marking a paper ballot, the election board explained at their meeting last week.
Some voters have been under the impression that it’s an either-or choice, and it’s really not, said election board President Amy Kelso.
Seeing paper ballots has come as a surprise to some voters. Brown County went all-electronic starting with the last presidential election in the fall of 2016.
However, going all-electronic with a system that is up to current voting requirements would have cost three times what this paper-based system did, Kelso said. All counties are going to have to use systems that have a “voter-verifiable paper audit trail” in a few years, and this one does.
Except for the way you mark your choices, there’s no difference between a vote done on paper and a vote done on the electronic machine — and there’s no advantage to voting early, added election board member Mark Williams.
“They’re counted at the same time and processed in the same way,” he said.
Contrary to what some voters might have heard, votes are not saved in the electronic machine and they are not “automatically counted”; all ballots are counted on election day.
“They gain nothing by voting on that machine. All it’s doing is creating a piece of paper that’s going to be counted later on,” Williams said.
The election board approved having three bipartisan teams of vote counters working to process all absentee votes — those that came in by mail and those that were cast early in person — on election day, Nov. 3. No votes will be counted before then.
Hand-delivering a ballot
If you requested a ballot by mail and haven’t sent it in yet, time is winding down on your window to do that.
Completed ballots that were sent to voters by mail have to be received by the county clerk by noon on election day, Nov. 3, or they will not be counted.
Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson recommended that voters put their completed ballots in the mail by Oct. 27, since it can be tough to predict how long mail takes to get from place to place.
An alternative to using the mail is to bring your completed ballot to the absentee voting office on the lower level of Deer Run Park during the hours it is open. Those are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays (until noon Nov. 2) and Saturday, Oct. 31 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
You will have to physically hand your completed ballot to an election worker at the early voting site; there is no contact-less drop box as the election board had planned to have, as Smith later learned from the state that that isn’t allowed.
If you’re still holding a mail-in ballot in your hands at 12:01 p.m. on election day, there’s still another way to make your vote count. Your only option at that point would be to vote in person at the polling place you would normally visit on election day. (Check this week’s Marketplace pages in the B section to see a list of polling places.)
You don’t have to have your mail-in ballot with you when you show up at your polling place on election day, Williams explained; when you check in, your voter registration will show that you requested a mailed ballot. You will have to fill out a form stating that your ballot was lost, destroyed or defective, then you’ll be able to vote in person, he said. If you haven’t already destroyed that mail ballot that you didn’t return in the mail, you should do so after you voted in person, he said, reading from information from the state election commission.
The voting system won’t allow a voter to vote both by mail and in person, election board members said.
When we’ll know
While clerks in some larger counties across the nation are saying that they may not have results on election night, Brown County officials are expecting to know results — at least for local offices — fairly quickly.
“With our system, I can’t imagine that won’t be the case,” Williams said.
The absentee vote counters will report to work earlier than they did in the primary to account for the larger number of early ballots. During the primary, when 1,395 people voted absentee, it took those counters about four hours to validate ballot signatures and feed ballots into the vote-counting machines.
Votes cast in person on election day also are fed into vote-counting machines — one machine for each of Brown County’s 12 precincts — and saved on a thumb drive. Election officials return that thumb drive to the voting office after polls close at 6 p.m., and with a few keystrokes, results are pulled up on a computer screen.
The newspaper also will have runners at each poll and the voting office to collect vote totals. We will report results as they arrive that evening on our website, bcdemocrat.com.
