Staff photo/Rhonda Silence This year’s mail-in referendum went off without a hitch. 68% of the county’s registered voters voted.
Approximately 20 people gathered at the Cook County courthouse the evening of Tuesday, November 3, 2009 to tally votes on the proposed 1% sales tax and a telephone exchange to be used as part of a broadband fiber optic cable system.
The polls closed at 8:00 p.m., but about 14 election judges showed up at 6:30 p.m., ready to start their work with six employees from the Auditor-Treasurer’s Office.
Unlike most elections, the residents of Grand Marais had mail-in ballots like everyone else in the county. Normally, three or four election judges sit at the courthouse and the Community Center from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Election Day to oversee voting by the citizens of Grand Marais. Having those citizens vote by mail saved the county between $780 and $1,040 in election judge wages at $10 an hour. Thecost of mailing those ballots to the 885 registered voters in Grand Marais, at $.61 per ballot for mailing, was $539.85.
The rest of the county always gets mail-in ballots, but anyone can vote at the Auditor- Treasurer’s Office, an official polling place.
According to Cook County Auditor- Treasurer Braidy Powers, a lot of ballots were returned to his office because they were addressed to people who had gone away for the winter and were no longer receiving mail locally. Ballots are not forwarded. Seasonal residents who homestead in Cook County must either vote before they leave or request an absentee ballot.
As of Monday morning, November 2, the mail-in ballot response was better than it usually is for a primary but not as good as for The Auditor- Treasurer’s Office was not seeing as many people come in at the last minute to register to vote as they usually do during presidential elections.
Mail-in ballots are anonymous on the inside, but the identity of the voter is displayed on the outside of the mailing envelope so election judges can check off who has voted. After 8:00 p.m. on November 3, the outside envelopes were separated from the ballots inside.
Having the voter’s identity on the outside envelope guarantees that each voter will only vote once and that each is a registered voter. It also helps officials clean up registered voter lists. Many times, people move out of a voting district without notifying the district, leaving voting lists with names that do not belong on them. In the State of Minnesota, people who have not voted in four years automatically get dropped from the list.
People who spoiled their ballots could return them to the Auditor-Treasurer’s Office and get a new one. People who had lost their ballots or were registered but did not receive one could fill out an affidavit stating such and get another one.
According to Auditor-Treasurer Braidy Powers, this year’s referendum brought very few unusable ballots.
The county has four machines that enable people with visual or manual disabilities to fill out their ballots properly. It also has eight ballot counting machines that were used to count the votes on November 3.
County staff and election judges finished their work by 11:45 p.m.
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