During November’s general election, several Union residents reported receiving incorrect ballots; the city is now looking towards solutions to ensure that will be less of a possibility going forward.
The city commission passed a resolution Wednesday asking the Boone County Board of Elections to redraw voting precincts so that only Union city residents can cast votes at polling sites within the boundaries of the city.
Former City Commissioner Doug Bine, who did not attend Wednesday’s meeting, later challenged the election in court after Boone County Clerk Justin Crigler admitted that errors had occurred. The legal case is ongoing.
Union precincts 1 and 4, where the errors are reported to have occurred, contain voters who live both within and without the boundaries of Union, even though both of the polling sites for those precincts are in the city itself.
Boone County had chosen to use pre-printed ballots on Election Day – one stack for city residents, another stack for county residents – rather than printing individual ballots for every single voter as they came in. County residents’ ballots did not have spaces for the commission race or Union’s medical cannabis ballot question.
“What can we as the city do to make sure that doesn’t happen again?” asked Commission Brian Garner at the meeting. “There’s no real process to make that happen. So, when in doubt, have a resolution.”
City resolutions have little concrete power. They are not binding pieces of legislation like a city ordinance, but they can serve as symbolic gestures expressing the desires of an elected body to another jurisdiction or the community at large. In short, this resolution was a way of signaling to the board of elections what the commission wanted them to do to avoid election errors in the future.
“The Boone County Board of Elections and county clerk has not clearly accepted responsibility,” said Mayor Larry Solomon, reiterating a point he’d made at the commission meeting earlier this month. “More importantly, they have not laid out a clear action plan as what they plan to do if this ever happens again.”
As organizing the stacks of printed ballots seemed to be a contributing factor to the confusion, Solomon broached the question of print-on-demand ballots. He voted early for the general election, and he told the other commissioners his ballot was printed, specific to his address, after he presented his identification to the worker at the early voting site. He recommended adding a demand for print-on-demand ballots to the resolution, and the other commissioners agreed that switching would be a preferable option.
“If they print the ballot at the time that [voters] get there, that eliminates the human error,” Solomon said.
“I’m fine with anything that will make it work,” said Commissioner John Mefford, “make it full proof.”
The resolution passed in a 3 to 0 unanimous vote, with Solomon, Garner and Mefford all voting yes. Commissioner Eric Dulaney arrived late to the meeting and did not cast a vote.
Both parties in the legal case surrounding the election issues must simultaneously submit arguments to the court by Monday, Jan. 27, laying out their proposed remedy for solving the election problems. Judge Richard Brueggemann of the Boone County Circuit Court will rule on what will happen from there.