Baldwin County joined thousands across Georgia this week, setting a record for one-day early voting.
Tuesday was the first day for early voting for the Nov. 5 General Election, and Baldwin County Chief Voter Registrar Randy Morrow said Wednesday morning that 1,333 ballots had been cast. While he could not provide a specific number, Morrow said that turnout easily surpassed the previous high for any one day, which was somewhere between 800 and 900 voters.
Despite the high turnout, the registrar said there were no problems.
“We had a flow; it was just perfect,” he commented. “Eight minutes was the longest anybody stood in line. Everybody was happy. They voted, got out of here. And, to check in, no more paper, just sign in; it just flowed good.”
Morrow said approximately 1,000 new voters signed up in the last 10 days.
“We have 29,203 registered voters,” he reported. That is up from 28,161 listed Friday, Oct. 4.
Baldwin County Probate Judge and Election Superintendent Todd Blackwell acknowledged that a Superior Court judge has blocked implementation of the State Election Board’s rule requiring hand counts of ballots election night.
“I kind of expected it,” he said Wednesday morning. “We didn’t do any training on the hand count. I was saving that to the end because I suspected they may suspend that anyway.” Blackwell said he doesn’t oppose the hand count to ensure that the totals match. He questions the timing.
“What I don’t like in this election is, we’re in the middle of voting, and they’re still debating what the rules should be,” he said, pointing out there has been no training of most local election officials as to the new procedures.
“It sounds simple enough, but what procedure do they want us to follow so we are uniform statewide? One county is going to count it one way, another county is going to do it a different way.
Then, what do we have?
“If this is a rule statewide,” Blackwell continued, “then, the State Election Board or the Secretary of State should dictate down to us, okay, this is the rule and how we want it done.
“Right now,” he went on, “all we have is a rule.
All 159 counties might count (the ballots) a different way.”
The election superintendent noted that someone may ask, ‘why does it’ matter?’
“It matters as far as efficiency goes and having the standard operating procedure. Otherwise, you’re going to get the possibility of pushback from people, ‘Oh, they didn’t count them the way we think the rule’…you’re even leaving that rule open for interpretation.
How are you going to do your count?”
Blackwell said his office is prepared to do whatever is necessary.
“We prefer to have enough time leading into an election that we can uniformly train our poll workers without having to come back at the last minute and retrain.”