Cascade County Commissioners voted unanimously during their Dec. 10 meeting to consolidate two rural polls to Expo Park.
The two polling stations, Ulm School and Centreville School, have high numbers of absentee voters and the county is working to remove polling places from schools.
The Ulm and Centreville polls were the last remaining polling stations in the county located in schools, according to county officials.
Cascade County Clerk and Recorder Rina Moore said the rural polls are hard to staff and over the last year, four election judges died, she said.
They’ve had trouble getting more election judges, particularly for rural polls, and the county cannot open the polls until there’s a minimum of three judges at all polling stations in the county.
Moore said her department had to backfill those locations with county staff, which is an additional cost and drains the available staff to work at Exhibition Hall, which often has the heaviest traffic on election days.
The number of people voting in person at the two rural polls, Moore said, has been declining.
During the 2018 general election, she said of the two precincts that voted in Centreville, 185 voted by mail and 142 voted in person. It was about 15 people per hour at that polling station, but it must be staffed for a 13 hour day, she said.
County officials that many people in those precincts show up to vote at Exhibition Hall anyway.
“We’re fairly confident this will be a good move,” Moore said during last week’s commission work session.
During the last election, two judges called out the night before election day and Moore said she had to send staff to those polls, which causes delays and additional cost to the county.
Moore said her office will follow the statutory requirements to notify voters of the change in their polling stations and that her staff had already started telling voters in those areas.
The change takes effect immediately after approval by the commission, she said, but voters wouldn’t notice the change until elections in June.
