BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Erie County Board of Elections had to make some quick changes for some polling places for the upcoming election. It turns out it is yet another complication from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Just like many other aspects of our lives these days, voting has been impacted by pandemic. The Erie County Board of Elections has to hustle to deal with it.
The latest wrinkle is what they describe as a "handful" of polling places that are not available with COVID concerns about visiting voters.
Erie Board of Elections Commissioner Jeremy Zellner says, "Nursing homes, senior centers, senior living facilities. I think a couple of fire halls have really pushed back to not have us be at those sites, so we've made about 16 changes out of the 330 across the county. Letters are going in the mail to all eligible voters in those districts. We've been putting it out on social media, it's on our website, so we're hoping that people have enough notice."
Also some school buildings opted out this year.
For the polling places that are open, some staffed with more senior citizen elections inspectors, special cleaning programs and other COVID-related steps have been taken.
Of course, some of the traditional in-person voting for next Tuesday has been offset by 37 early voting sites, which have been open since last weekend. There are also mail-in ballots that created a bit of a crunch of their own.
Actually, 200,000 absentee ballots were sent out. Some are still going out as people had to apply for them.
They also had to deal with technically four elections combined into one final date of June 23. A federal grant did help to basically cover the extra costs with all these moves.
There is one last note about election night which also is very different. Zellner points out: "You're not gonna have instant results on election night. It may take a long, long time to get the results. We won't even start opening those absentees until eight days after the election, so we're not gonna see results that evening unless there's some kind of blowout in a race."
Zellner also says it was an "intense" evening on Tuesday at the Board of Elections for the seemingly routine annual round of voting on school district budgets.
He says right from the start it was a different year for the district officials who relied on mail in ballots. "We usually print ballots for the school districts. We help them out by doing that. We simply couldn't handle the volume this year. We usually send out equipment so they can vote right at the location. We simply couldn't pull our staff off of the ballot preparation that we had for absentee ballots."
Those absentee ballots referred to the primary election next Tuesday, which is only a week apart from the school budget tabulation date as set by the state.
Some districts did decide to do their own hand-count, but many of the others decided to bring in their ballots to the board of elections. And that sheer volume forced some board of election staffers to pull an all-nighter."
And here's an overwhelming example from the Kenmore-Tonawanda District Clerk Gina Santa Maria: "The most since I've been District Clerk we had was about 2,200 voting in person, and we had just about 11,000 mail-in ballots."
So perhaps it was a more inclusive vote but also more labor intensive with the verification and actual opening of the outside mailed envelopes to get to the sealed ballots.
Zellner says even the board's tabulation machine faced challenges with the school budget votes.
"If ballots are folded up and put in an envelope - sometimes somebody wants to fold them multiple times. They've gotta be straightened out. If they come back and they're all crumply - that's gonna cause issues for our machines - they're not used to that. So there's a number of small things that sometimes hold you up."
So far only the Cheektowaga Central Schools budget has failed to pass.
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