By Gage Johnson, Multimedia Coordinator
It’s Election Day and voters are lining up to make their choices for local elections as well as the national election. But as citizens get their ballots and make their votes, does anyone stop and think, ‘I wonder what all had to be done to make this polling location ready’?
If voters in Calloway County were wondering, they have the County Clerk’s office and about 24 election workers to thank for getting polling locations set up.
Workers and the office have things a little different this time around, as the pandemic inevitably affected the setup of each of the four supercenters as well as the setup for the Robert O. Miller Annex that is being used for early voting.
The design for the setup at early voting and the general election polls were made by the County Clerk and then put in place by election workers.
Mike Wilson who has volunteered as an election worker, said that once the setup was made for early voting that it was pretty easy as far as manual labor went.
“This stays set up overnight,” Wilson said. “Basically in the morning, we’ll put out the vote here signs and the american flag. Then there’s a couple of handicap spots we have to reserve back there for voters. [It takes] 10 minutes maybe to do all that and then everyone gets here and we start the day. The polls open right at 8 a.m.”
It’s clearly different because of the pandemic and a few changes to guidelines have been implemented to keep voters safe.
Voters keep their own pen if they do personal ballots and there is plexiglass to separate the workers and voters as well.
“It’s been quite different of course,” Wilson said. “We sanitize our screens with a disinfectant wipe between every person and we try periodically throughout the day to go and wipe all these stations. And of course you can see the barriers that we have.”
Despite all the changes, Wilson said that everything has gone well at the early voting location and that most people seem to enjoy voting early.
As far as the general election goes, there’s a little more to the general set up as opposed to the primary and early voting locations.
The four supercenters that will be used on Election Day are the CFSB Center and the North Elementary School, Southwest Elementary School and the East Elementary School gymnasiums.
At each of the respective locations, the County Road Department will help deliver all the equipment they need for election day according to Calloway County Clerk Antonia Faulkner.
“Our County Road Department is wonderful to help the Clerk’s office as far as delivering the machines,” Faulkner said. “So they’ll actually deliver all the machines and the cords and the paperwork and all that stuff to have it available. And our election worker is the one that will have all of the paperwork when they get there in the morning.”
“We’ll have three e-scan machines and one e-slate machine at each location,” Faulkner said. “The e-slate machine is an ADA approved machine. It’s where a wheelchair can go up to or a person can be seated at it and instead of using a pen you’ll actually use a dial to make your choices and hit a button. It also has earphones if you have trouble seeing the screen.”
The e-scan is like a paper ballot and they will fill in the boxes next to the candidates of their choice and then scan it into the machine.
With all the machines set in place, the workers and County Clerk’s office will open the doors for voters bright and early on Nov. 3, with early voting ending on Nov. 2.
“On Election Day, Nov. 3, they’re open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” Faulkner said. “So the doors open at 6 a.m. and run all day, there’s no lunch hour or anything like that. And then at 6 p.m., the machines have a clock on them. So at 6 p.m. the sheriff on the location gets behind the last person in line and that’s it.”
Then comes the moment everyone has been anticipating —the tallying of the results.
Once all the ballots have been received at a central location—this being the County Clerk’s office—they will close the machines and begin to process everything.
“That machine will tally up all the votes, we’ll process that in another computer and then we’ll be able to give our results for Calloway County as of 8 p.m., Nov. 3,” Faulkner said.
Faulkner encourages all citizens to come and vote. Not only because the time, money and effort put into everything, but to let their voice be heard in this year’s election.
Story Process
In approaching election coverage, we wanted to find something a little different than your typical coverage that one would receive every four years. That being said, we thought that after highlighting where and how to vote in the 2020 election, that we should highlight election workers.
We suggested this story idea because while the numerous ways to vote this election was much appreciated by many, a lot of people failed to recognize the time and effort election workers put in to help—for free at that matter.
So we spoke with Calloway County Clerk Antonia Faulkner to ask about the setup of the polling locations in Calloway County and the election workers as well. She also put me in contact with election workers and allowed me to take pictures at said polling locations.
We got to speak to Mike Wilson as well as other election workers at the Robert O. Miller Annex who gave us information at the early voting location, but were not quoted.
We thought it would be a nice story to highlight those that work so hard at every election and so we decided to make sure it was published while voting was still going on.
That way people knew how much time and work was put in by said workers and that they could thank them or know that if something went awry they were doing their very best to make voting an easy experience for all.
Everything involved with this complete news story was done by Gage Johnson except for the google map of the voting locations, which was done by Addison Watson.
In order to help us represent the voice of the community to the best of our abilities, if you have any questions, have tips, or feel that something wasn’t reported correctly in the following story, reach out to multimedia coordinator Gage Johnson at gjohnson17@murraystate.edu.