Changes for the future
More than half of the Johnson County residents who voted in this year’s general election cast their ballot before Election Day, and that is leading officials to consider some changes in the future.
Nearly 35,000 voters cast their ballots during early voting this election, which was a first for Johnson County.
In past years, early voting has never been so popular, and the majority of voters still waited until Election Day to have their say, Johnson County Clerk Susie Misiniec said.
But that changed this year, and officials said that helped reduce the lines on Election Day.
And now, they will need to look at ways to make the early voting process smoother in the future, Misiniec said.
The next election, in 2018, won’t be a presidential election, but it will be countywide, and it will have popular races on the ballot, including county sheriff, she said.
Election officials are looking at additional sites in the northern area of the county where they could host early voting, since that is where the two most popular sites were located, she said.
And they are looking at how many workers should be assigned to each site, she said. Officials added more workers to early voting sites in the final week before Election Day when long lines were forming that caught officials off guard.
“We’ve just got a lot of planning to do,” Misiniec said.
“We are working on it already.”
Delayed results
Two issues that delayed results Tuesday night are on the county’s list for a fix.
The first problem was with counting paper ballots that were cast by mail or that were taken from emailed in ballots from voters serving in the military.
Counting paper ballots already takes more time, but this year, the county had to count more than 3,000 paper ballots, Misiniec said.
Each ballot has to be compared to the envelope it came in, and the application for a mail-in ballot. And for each emailed ballot, election officials had to take the votes and put them on a paper ballot, a strict process that requires both the Republican and Democrat members of the election board to be involved. That same process was used when a voter crossed out a mistake on their paper ballot, Misiniec said.
Because of the number of ballots, that counting process took hours longer than expected, she said.
The county will work to better organize those ballots in the future, so the process can go much faster, she said.
Another key change will be in retraining poll workers on how to close machines at the end of the night.
During Tuesday’s election and in the spring, results were delayed when election officials had to go back to a polling site to get voting machines because results weren’t properly downloaded, adding an hour or so to the process of tabulating results.
In both cases, poll workers did not properly close a machine, and removed a memory card too early, before all the results from that day’s voting were downloaded, she said.
“We need to instill this in inspectors, poll workers, to be very careful in the process,” she said.
“It’s human error. It happens. We all make mistakes. It was correctable. We got it in.”
School board race issue
Whether a Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson school board race will be impacted by an error on Morgan County’s ballots is yet to be known.
On Election Day, officials noticed an error on the Morgan County ballots voters had been using all through early voting and used all of Tuesday. In the three-person, at-large Nineveh-Hensley-Jackson school board race, voters were told to pick one candidate, when they should have been picking two, Morgan County Clerk Stephanie Elliott said.
The problem had not been noticed before Election Day, despite multiple officials and voters reading the ballot, she said.
Elliott contacted state officials, who said that she would only need to take action if a candidate in the race contested the results, she said. According to state rules, candidates have until Nov. 22 to ask for a recount.
Biggest, smallest turnout
Johnson County had one of its highest turnouts in recent years, with 63 percent of the county’s registered voters casting a ballot.
In most precincts, which organizes voters based on where they live and who is on their ballot, 50 percent or more people voted.
But in some areas, those numbers fell short, or went much higher.
The highest turnout at 78 percent was a tie between two precincts: Clark 1, which is east of Greenwood and south of Rocklane Road, and Pleasant 43, which covers the area of Greenwood between Interstate 65 and Sheek Road, between Main Street and Worthsville Road.
The lowest precinct at 32 percent was Pleasant 15, which covers the city of Greenwood between U.S. 31 and Eastwood Drive, between Stop 18 and Worthsville roads.
