County should continue using vote centers

This letter to the editor was published in the Herald/Review on September 15, 2023.

On Tues., Sept. 26, there will be an important Board of Supervisors meeting. We urge all Cochise County residents to participate (in person or online) and write your supervisor to tell them to approve the vote centers as required under the laws they swore to uphold.

To the editor:

We need good governance and fiscal responsibility. Not precinct voting. Not paper registers. Not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. So let us continue using Vote Centers (Agenda Item #15 at Tuesday’s meeting) and e-poll books. It would be foolish not to have them.

It would disproportionately hurt working people, the elderly and disabled. We are all now used to finding and voting at any Vote Center, if we do not vote early or by mail.

Working people, tired at the end of each day, may not even be close enough to reach a particular polling place before it closes.

If voters must struggle to find a new polling place, which will happen, it will take everyone longer to vote there. Requiring provisional ballots takes longer.

And when longer lines form for that reason and/or any other (e.g., because of staff or equipment failures, which are more likely to happen with more places, pieces and parts), problems will compound.

No longer will voters have the option of driving to another polling place to get their vote counted, which is how our current Vote Center system works.

Changing back will also further hurt tax-payers. We end up paying for your unnecessarily duplicative, and yet fully customized, logistical choices. We will pay for more staff and/or for more staff hours (days and weeks spent finding and separately contracting with 55 different ADA compliant places). We will pay for more securing, supplying, and resupplying each of them.

The cost of delivering and picking up secure election equipment at each of these 55 places alone is astronomical.

We all must ask the Board of Supervisors vote in support Vote Centers and e-poll books. Costly, anti-democratic options must be rejected. In the clear light of day, such nostalgia is simply backward and hurts us all.

Anne Carl

Bisbee