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Guidelines for November voters are on Hazelwood School District’s Channel 99
The Nov. 7 election will only be the second time the new touch screen voting booths have been used in St. Louis County and Hazelwood School District and the Board of Elections are offering tips on how to make election day smooth for all voters.
The district worked with the Board of Elections to produce a video that will air on district cable channel Charter Communications Channel 99 that demonstrates the use of the touch screen booths as well as the optical scan voting booths for persons who choose to vote on paper ballots by filling in circles.
Since the question of requiring photo identification at the polls is still being litigated, Judge Joseph A. Goeke, director of the St. Louis County Board of Elections, said voters will vote the same way they have in the past.
“What we find is that most people use their driver’s license, so that is, in fact, a [photo] ID,” said Goeke. “The second most common thing that we use—that we see is the identification card that we mail out with their signature on it.”
Although voting machines may have gone high-tech, one commonplace communications device will not be welcome at the polls.
“This year, it is illegal to bring a cell phone into a polling place because so many cell phones have cameras in them, that’s the way people buy votes,” Goeke said. He added that voters may have the cell phones in their possession, but they cannot use them.
The old midday returns on election day have now vanished like an eight-track cassette. Goeke says the new voting machines physically cannot accommodate midday returns.
“What we’ve done instead of middays—at 7:00 we run the absentees and then starting at nine o’clock we’ll start putting on the web any incomplete results of what we have,” Goeke explained.
The video offers advice on how to get through the lines quicker and how to vote absentee, which Goeke says is doing brisk business at the elections office.
“We’re going to be sending out in the mail about 5,700 applications for absentee ballots,” he said. “We have had in person absentee ballots going on in our office for five days and we’ve had exactly 300 people so that’s 60 a day, which, for early on in the process is a huge number.” Goeke speculates the Senate race and amendments may be the reason for the high volume of absentee voting.
For more information on voting in St. Louis County, go to website at http://www.stlouisco.com/elections.
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