Parsons employees Carol Hebb and Jason Myers work Friday to process the vote-by-mail returns. None of the ballots were counted until after the voting was completed Tuesday night.
By Beth Christian Broschart
The Parsons Advocate
PARSONS – A local town was one of four municipalities that participated in a different way residents could cast their votes. Parsons administrator/treasurer Jason Myers said the vote-by-mail was a success in Parsons.
“The vote-by-mail was available to Class 4 towns, based on population,” Myers said. “The reason we tried the vote-by-mail was in past elections, we did not have a very good turnout. I think the reason for the poor participation was that people did not know our municipal elections run the same year as the primary and general elections.”
Myers said people came out in May and voted in the primary election and thought they were done until November.
“Our municipal election falls in June and people had that misconception because they just voted in May,” Myers said. “They would think they did not see the mayor’s name on the ballot, and did not put two and two together.”
Myers said one of Parsons’ future goals would be to merge the municipal election with the primary election.
“We are working with the Tucker County Clerk’s Office to put the ballots together like it is done throughout the state,” Myers said. “The Secretary of State’s Office highly recommends we do this and it offers a great cost savings and people can come out and vote the one time.”
Myers said the only thing stopping that process is Ward 1 precinct for the City of Parsons and the County does not line up.
“We are going to try to work through this problem to make that possible,” he said.
Another good result of the vote-by-mail was that applications for the process were mailed out to 1,000 people who were on the books as registered voters in the city of Parsons.
“We mailed everybody an application, letter and instructions,” Myers said. “We will not see too many savings with the election this year because we received a lot of those envelopes back that we mailed. People are no longer at those addresses and the envelopes were not forwarded. So we took those and were able to clean the books out and we will take that to the County Clerk’s Office so they can update our book.”
Myers said they started out with 1,000 names and said next time they do it, it won’t be as many people.
“We have about 58 people who participated in early vote-by-mail,” Myers said. “The great thing is those are people who usually do not vote in the municipal election.”
Myers said some of the people responding said they have never voted in a city election before. He said the city is hoping for a better than normal turnout for the election since everyone was alerted about the date of the election.
“The option to vote early by mail in municipal elections is a convenient option for voters and provides possible savings to municipalities,” said Secretary of State Natalie E. Tennant, the state’s chief elections officer. “We are happy that four municipalities are utilizing vote-by-mail for early voting and hope that others will take advantage of this option.”
The four municipalities participating in the vote-by-mail are Parsons, Mount Hope, Handley and Oceana.