The Yuma Zone Blog

The recent election results in Yuma County were delayed causing several races to be undecided for an extended period of time. The excuse produced for this issue was that it took too much time to process and count mail in ballots, in turn delaying the final election results.

 It has been suggested that the solution to this issue was to move up the deadline for mail in ballots by two weeks. Of course, what was not discussed was that this would essentially abolish the use of mail in ballots in Yuma County!

A simple examination of the timelines involved will show the problem. Currently early ballots are mailed 33 days before the election, if you have already requested an early ballot. It is common knowledge that the U.S.P.S. takes a week to delivere Yuma to Yuma mail,  so we loose 2 weeks of early voting just to get a ballot and mail it back in. You can add an additional week if you have not mailed in your early voting request form well in advance of the election. This leaves between 12 and 19 days to vote via mail. If you then move the deadline for mail in ballots up by two weeks, you are left with at most 5 days to do your voting, if you have already requested an early ballot. If you have not requested your mail in ballot at least 35 days in advance, the chances are your vote will not be counted at all. Not to mention that you will have to make your voting choices 21 days (vs. the current 7 days) in advance of the election. 

The suggestion of enlisting help from other county employees would seem to be the better solution to dealing with mail in ballots. Yuma voters should not be discouraged from voting by enforcing a arbitrary timeline. If there are not enough workers to count ballots then assign more workers to count ballots. With nearly 1400 employees on the Yuma County payroll,  cross training of some workers and temporarily assigning them to dealing with mail in ballots would be a simple matter.   Mail in ballots are supposed to encourage voting by an informed electorate. By complicating the mail in voting process in order to address the counties inability to provide timely counts, the county is does a disservice to all Yuma County residents. It is time for our government entities to step up to the plate and offer solutions not obstructions.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 26th, 2006 at 8:34 am and is filed under Yuma Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.