Voters in 4 counties will vote by mail

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BY NANCY HICKS / Lincoln Journal Star

Adam Fischer did not drive the 13 miles to a rural school in Cherry County to vote in the November 2006 statewide election. Instead, the rancher sat on the sofa in his living room marking his ballot, part of a pilot program to see how well a mandatory mail-in voting program would work.

This spring, Fischer will be among almost 2,000 rural residents in four counties who no longer will have to go to the polls. They’ll participate in an all-mail voting system reserved for the most sparsely populated Nebraska counties.

The pilot program was well received, said Secretary of State John Gale. So this year he has approved the all-mail voting for 22 precincts in four counties: Cherry, Morrill, Boone and Keya Paha.

Voters in those four counties will get their primary election ballots in the mail, mark them in the convenience of their homes and mail them, in already-stamped envelopes, back to their respective courthouses.

Fischer said he’s very comfortable voting by mail. He used a mail ballot as a college student. And he knows that the all-mail voting system for small-population precincts saves the counties tax dollars.

“This is the cheaper way,” he said.

“The old system wasn’t broke out here,” said Tom Elliott, Cherry County clerk, where 16 of the 20 precincts will use the all-mail system. But the old-fashioned way, marking ballots in a neighbor’s garage that then would be hand counted, no longer met requirements, he said. 

The all-mail voting, available with permission by the secretary of state to counties with fewer than 7,000 residents, is the answer to federal requirements that all polling places must be handicap accessible.

“We were voting in one-room schoolhouses, in people’s homes, their garage, their shop or sometimes their kitchen,” Elliott said. These places had steps that didn’t meet the handicap accessible rules, he said.

“It didn’t make sense to go out in the middle of nowhere and replace doors and put in ramps,” he said.

In addition, the county would have needed two $5,000 machines (one for voters with disabilities) for each polling place, he said. It didn’t make sense to have that kind of equipment out in the middle of the Sandhills where seven precincts have fewer than 60 voters, he said.

One alternative to buying machines and putting in ramps was to create fewer polling places. But in a county that is bigger than Connecticut — 100 miles wide and 60 miles north to south — and has few roads, that would mean asking voters to drive 50 to 60 miles one way to vote, he said.

“These were not good, sensible solutions,” Elliott said.

But all-mail voting does have its disadvantages. Voting was a social event. You went to vote to have a piece of pie and a cup of coffee with your neighbor, he said, and some folks are saddened to lose that aspect.

Precincts approved for all-mail voting in the spring primary election range from 23 voters to 219, Gale said. The average precinct statewide has about 450 registered voters. In urban areas, the precinct average is 800 voters, Gale said.

Reach Nancy Hicks at 473-7250 or nhicks@journalstar.com.