County to add new voting precincts

BENTON COUNTY - Benton County, following dictates of a new state law, will create 15 more voting precincts for next year’s elections.

The Election Commission gave its approval Friday to a plan to increase the voting precincts from 57 to 72.

The state Legislature passed Act 1211 of 2013, according to John Brown Jr., commission chairman. The act requires counties to cap the size of voting precincts at 3,000 voters. There’s already talk the Legislature may further reduce the sizeof precincts, Brown said.

“The rumor is it’s going to be brought up in the next legislative session to reduce precincts to 1,200 registered voters per precinct,” Brown said.

Dana Caler, county voter registration supervisor, said that prospect was discussed at a recent meeting of election offi cials. The county can put more than one precinct in a polling place, but state law restricts that to no more than three, Caler said.

“Even if it’s just three, we’re going to have to have multiple ballots and you’re going to have to have more workers at each polling place,” Caler said. “I did arough estimate in my head and at 1,200 per precinct we’d have 147 or 148 precincts.”

Russ Anzalone, Election Commission member, said he didn’t understand the drive to reduce the size of precincts.

“I don’t know what the purpose of getting down to 1,200 voters is,” Anzalone said.

The idea is to make it easier to report election results by having fewer voters in each precinct, Caler said.

Robbyn Tumey, the third member of the commission, pointed out the county has a limited number of voting machines available. Brown agreed and saidhe wouldn’t favor buying more, since the machines are no longer being made and the only ones now available are those other jurisdictions have used and discarded.

“I can’t see us buying refurbished machines,” Brown said.

The changes the commission has to make to comply with law will affect about a fourth of the registered voters, Anzalone said. The county will need to send out new voter identification cards to roughly 31,500 voters affected by the changes with the information about their new precinct and, for some, new voting location, Caler said.