The COVID-19 pandemic has left plans for this year’s primary election still up in the air. The Starke County Election Board has come up with a plan to combine polling places due to the public health emergency. But Clerk Bernadette Welter-Manuel says she’s hesitant to publicize it, since there’s a chance the state may do away with in-person voting entirely for the primary and require residents to vote by mail.
“We don’t even know if this is going to happen yet, and if I’m pushing absentee-by-mail right now, and they hear, ‘Well, we’ll be voting at this place, this place, and this place,’ ‘Well, why do I want to do absentee-by-mail, then?’ And if that doesn’t happen, then, of course, it will come back and bite me in the butt,” the clerk said.
The state has already pushed the primary back to June 2 and opened up mail-in voting to all eligible voters. Welter-Manuel told the rest of the election board Wednesday that the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office has been surveying clerks about how they would feel about a mail-in-ballot-only election and if their counties could get enough poll workers for regular voting.
She said if mail-in voting were the only option, extra workers would be needed to handle all the ballots. “I’m not sure how that’s going to work in the larger counties because that’s going to be a mess for them, but for us, we could handle it,” Welter-Manuel said. “We got an extension on the time that we have to have the election certified by. They extended the time until June 12, so we have 10 days to count everything.”
During a press conference Thursday, Governor Eric Holcomb said he’s in constant contact with Secretary of State Connie Lawson, and she’s been in contact with the state chairs of both major parties. “This has come up, obviously, in discussions with the state election commission and they’ll have some recommendations,” the governor said, “but right now, I’m waiting for them to make a specific recommendation on how we can safety and securely carry out, not just our June 2, but our November election.”
Welter-Manuel said she plans to hold off on taking the list of consolidated polling places to the county commissioners for final approval until after the Indiana Election Commission meets on April 22.
