By David Fortier |
The Registrars of Voters Office has been processing 600 ballots a day on average, since early voting began on Monday, Oct. 21.
Saturday was a slower day, but the office still anticipated another 300 or so.
“We started Monday 10 a.m. and we had probably 50 people in line right at the start and it quickly grew to 150 right out to the front door, down the hallway, down the stairs to the front door,” said Kevin McCauley, Democratic Registrar of Voters, who works alongside his Republican counterpart, Jolene Lusitani.
“We process people every couple of minutes. It’s going smoothly. We have four to five checkers to get people through,” McCauley said.
That first day, he guessed, people were through the line in no more that 45 minutes.
On Saturday, he said the pace is slower but steady.
“We are probably close to 200, around that amount, with four hours to go,” McCauley said. “So we will see. We’ll probably do about half of that, so maybe between 200 and 300 for the day today and then we will see what will happen for the first Sunday.”
If there was a hitch, he said, it was waiting for the state to send a second batch of envelopes, which arrived Friday.
The registrar’s office is dealing with several different types of ballots–the different colored early voting ones for the polling places, same day registration and absentee.
The office has been averaging around a dozen same day registration ones, but these are counted separately, he said.
Early voting is keeping pace with absentee voting which was instituted during the 2020 presidential election, Covid-19 was an issue, McCauley said. That year 10,000 absentee ballots were cast.
“This early voting is trending up to that ballot,” he said. “If we continue this trend we will be around several 1,000. And then we have absentee ballots that are up to at 1,500 at least that have been sent out, so adding that we will be in that same ballpark.”
He said people do comment about their early voting experience and most are complimentary.
“They are positive, thanking us for the smooth process, streamlined,” he said. “It didn’t take as long as they thought it would. And they get through and out, so it’s working.”
McCauley said, “We put a lot of thought and attention into what we needed to do to work things, and we tweaked some things to improve as we go every day.”
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