The Pulaski County Election Board is gearing up for next year’s election cycle. Board members met Monday to adopt their 2018 budget proposal.
Member Laura Bailey said the county’s payment to voting machine vendor MicroVote is set to go down by about $7,000, after the company found a few areas for potential savings. “They felt that we were able to handle some of the functions that we were paying them to do, such as Election Day services, which is like $2,200 or $2,400 or something, and also the poll worker training,” she explains. MicroVote will continue to create ballots and run the public tests for Pulaski County.
Meanwhile, the election board plans to budget an extra $5,000 for IT services. Board member Jon Frain said the county’s vote center plan requires an IT technician to be on hand on Election Day, but there was some uncertainty following the resignation of former IT Director RB Walters. While the county now has a new IT director in place, the election board still wants to have money available, in case he’s not able to help out on Election Day.
Frain says the election board is also asking for a slight pay raise for County Clerk Christi Hoffa, “a $200 increase for the year, just simply because she gets paid very little by the election board to do everything she does do.”
Board members say they also made some budget adjustments, based on last year’s election cycle. Frain says that a surge in absentee ballots has led to some higher postage costs. Similarly, the county had to add poll workers to the Winamac Vote Center last year, after higher-than-expected traffic during the May 2016 primary.
Following Monday’s budget adoption, the election board was scheduled to discuss the proposal with the county council.
