“OMG – over 100,000 people in that football stadium?!? How will they ever get a hot dog?”
If you are taken aback by the stupidity of that question, you know how I feel reading all the hot takes on the voting setup in Louisville, Kentucky, where I live.
Everyone and their brother — and sister — is riffing on the theme of “380,000 voters and ONE polling location!” and calling out “voter suppression, voter suppression!” And if that were true, it would be insane.
But it’s not. Not even close.
Normally, we vote in 270 polling locations across the county. Many of these are in small places (like the lobby of a middle school gym, where I usually vote) where social distancing would be difficult, if not impossible. And, of course, most of our poll workers are retired, so they are older and particularly susceptible to COVID-19.
So, faced with the very real possibility of not having nearly enough poll workers AND needing to figure out some way to keep people safe, the local Board of Elections made a decision: move all the in-person voting to a single, very large location. So they chose the Kentucky Exposition Center.
This is a BIG building. (It’s an exposition center, right?) Lots of room to spread out. And the BOE did just that.
So, here’s the point I want to get across:
This is not one polling location. This is one building with eighteen polling locations inside.
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I spoke with the comms person for the BOE this morning. He added these details:
- There are eighteen different queue lines for voting.
- There will be persons at all entrances with electronic polling books. You give them your name and address, they look you up, then get you into the correct line.
- Each line can hold 25 people at a time, 6 feet apart.
- At the end of the line will be multiple precincts with different ballots, just like a normal election. You get the paper ballot for your precinct, go to one of the stand-up private voting tables, mark your ballot, and turn it in to be scanned. You’re done.
- There are 2,200 different ballots in use, due to the various combinations of small-city elections, state legislature primaries, Metro Council primaries, and so on. (Every political body draws their lines separately, so next-door neighbors can literally be in different Council districts as well as different state lege districts.)
- Masks will be required, and hand sanitizer will be readily available.
- The local public transportation service is running free shuttles from their downtown hub to the Expo Center so people can get there to vote.
Let’s run the numbers.
Jefferson County has about 616,000 registered voters. Let’s assume a 40% turnout for the primary, which would be the largest since 2000. (Last year’s was about 12% of registered voters across the state.) That’s about 246,000 voters who have to get to the Expo Center tomorrow and vote in those 18 lines.
But wait! We’ve got expanded absentee voting this year, and thousands of people have taken advantage of it. Over 35% of registered voters in Jefferson County requested absentee ballots. That’s about 215,000. So, that 246,000 goes down to about 31,000.
But wait! We’ve had early voting as well. People have been able to go vote at the Board of Elections office since June 8, and at the Expo Center since June 15. Let’s assume, just for discussion, that about 5% of voters have voted early. That takes the number of voters having to show up tomorrow down to about 29,450.
So, in 12 hours, or 720 minutes, we need to get 29,450 voters through 18 lines. That’s 1,600 per line, or about 2 per minute. Considering that each line ends in multiple tables, that might be doable. And that’s IF we have that level of turnout.
Is it ideal? Of course not.
In hindsight, it might have been better to have two or three such locations, instead of just one. But, that would mean that everyone in the county would have to be told which of the three was THEIR location. Imagine people driving to a location in one end of the county, only to discover that their location is in another part of the county.
Given all the circumstances, the BOE made the best decision they could.
Ultimately, of course, the BEST solution would be no-excuse absentee voting, or even vote by mail, for all elections. And perhaps this election will move that along.
But to all the hot-take people out there, I’ll say it again: This is not one location. This is one building with eighteen polling locations.
Get your story straight.
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Cross-posted from Forward Kentucky, the progressive voice for Kentucky politics.