The sky is not falling: Fayette has the sites, the workers, the security for election voting.
In retrospect, says Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins, he should have been a little calmer when he announced that his office would have to close two months before the election because of an employee with COVID-19.
“This is a devastating setback for us,” screamed Blevins’ press release on Monday, which further said absentee ballots would be delayed during a pandemic in probably the most important election of our lifetimes. Judging from our inboxes, it scared a lot of already highly anxious folks.
“I shouldn’t have been so harsh with my language but I was freaking out when I wrote it,” Blevins admitted Wednesday.
By Tuesday, the city had helped resolve the issue, sending employees home with computers installed with VPN, and allowing the work of voter registration and putting ballots in envelopes to continue.
And on Wednesday, Blevins and Mayor Linda Gorton announced the six early voting locations that will open on Oct. 13 and continue to allow voting for three weeks starting Oct. 13, including Saturdays.
The locations — the Bluegrass Community and Technical College campus at Leestown, the Lexington Senior Center, the Dunbar Center and the Northside, Tates Creek and Beaumont branches of the Lexington Public Library — are sprinkled all around town, giving people plenty of choices for early voting.
There will also be secure boxes at most of those locations for people to turn in their ballots if they don’t want to put them in the mail.
So we don’t need any more Chicken Little imitations. But why wouldn’t people be worried? The incumbent president is already casting doubts on the election’s legitimacy, the post office that’s supposed to deliver absentee ballots is being hobbled by his political allies, militia groups are telling their members to patrol polling places, we may not know who won election night and election lawyers everywhere are girding their loins. And we’re in a pandemic.
“I think people are keyed up, and very anxious about the voting process,” said Rena Wiseman, one of the people who contacted the paper after Blevins’ announcement. “We’ve been barraged about concerns about the post office, people are very concerned and I think that’s why you have 45,000 people requesting ballots.”
Blevins has also been keyed up. He was trying to find polling places at a time when the Convention Center is being rebuilt and schools are scheduled to be in session. Some people are yelling at him to get ballots out quicker and others are yelling for more in-person sites.
But here’s some more good news: It turns out that 80 people heeded the call for poll workers, so there will be plenty of people to work even three extra weeks of voting.
Frank Cannavo is one of them. Even though he’s 72 and retired, he thinks the risk of COVID-19 is minimal if everyone is in masks, and he signed right up to be a poll worker for three weeks of early voting.
“It’s too important not to do so,” he said. “What am I going to do, watch TV? It is a lot of work, but it’s worth it — sometimes you have to put it aside and do what’s right for everyone else. “There’s nothing more important than elections being run fairly and people believing they’ve had their say. “
Blevins knows a whole lot about voting, and it’s made him a glass half-full kind of guy.
“From a voter’s perspective, this is great, it’s a smorgasbord,” with voters able to choose from absentee ballots, early voting or Election Day voting, he noted. “But from a county clerk’s perspective it’s worst case, because it’s like having three separate elections. It’s going to be very difficult.”
(Two hours after Blevins’ press conference, a group of state House Democrats released proposed legislation to make early voting and no-excuse absentee ballots legal, although it will face a fight from Republicans.)
Blevins thinks Nov. 3 turnout could surpass Fayette County’s record of 72 percent in 2008. He’s urging people to request absentee ballots so that the in-person sites don’t get overwhelmed. And turn them in early. There’s a longer window to count absentee ballots, so he thinks we could know as much as 60 percent of the Fayette vote on election night.
So let’s try to make life easier for our county clerk. Vote early in person or turn in your absentee ballot as soon as you can. Even though it’s tempting, don’t wait until Election Day to turn in your ballot. The next two deadlines are coming up fast: Oct. 5 is the last day to register to vote, and Oct. 9 is the last day to request an absentee ballot. Early voting starts Oct. 13.
For more information on voting, got to https://www.kentucky.com/news/politics-government/article245657325.html or www.govoteky.com.
This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 9:55 AM.
