With a troubled early-voting period now behind it, the Shelby County Election Commission is working to insure voters receive correct ballots on Thursday’s Election Day. But the commission and its staff continue to ask voters to be sure when they go to the polls that they know which state and federal districts they should be voting in, and to ask poll workers for clarification if there is any question of whether they are voting in the correct districts. “We continue to work to try to make sure we will be as successful as possible on Election Day,” said commission chairman Robert Meyers. “We’re doing all we can to make it through this election, and then post election we’ll be taking some serious looks at what happened and why it happened.” The state said last week it will conduct a performance audit after the election, and Meyers said Monday he hopes that will help identify core problems that have affected previous elections as well.
The commission waited until mid-June to update its voter database to reflect the street-level changes required for many districts because of the state legislature’s January redistricting of state and federal voting boundaries. The election commission had hoped to include Shelby County Commission redistricting changes in its once-a-decade readjustment, but the county commission’s voting district reapportionment, mandated to be completed by Jan. 1, still is unresolved.
That has led to an error rate that some close observers of voting participation data say is at a little more than 5 percent — 2,518 errors affecting 2,266 voters through Thursday’s early voting, according to Dr. Joe Weinberg, an ally of Democratic candidates who was among the first to spot problems the state has confirmed. In all, 62,600 voters cast ballots in the in the early voting period that concluded on Saturday.
Full Article: Shelby County Election Commission hopes for smoother vote on Thursday » The Commercial Appeal.
The Voting News
A News Service of the Verified Voting Foundation
