Considers precinct changes

Starting at 10 a.m. today the county board of elections began the process of validating and counting provisional ballots voted in the November general election.

This must be done before the board can certify the election with the final results for all candidates and issues. The only result that could possibly be affected appears to be the senior citizens levy.

That issue would have put a 1-mill levy on all property taxpayers in the county to fund current and new senior citizens services. The new tax would have brought in $800,000 a year for five years. It lost by 95 votes or 8,566 to 8471.

There are 283 provisional votes to be considered with the largest numbers in South Point, Ironton and Coal Grove precincts.

“A provisional ballot is when according to the poll books a person does not show up as entitled to vote at the polls that day,” Mark McCown, BOE member, said. “It could be that individual has moved and is showing up on an old precinct book. They didn’t have identification when they went to the polls. It could be there was an error in the Secretary of State’s records.”

Whatever the reason, that individual is entitled to vote a provisional ballot. Now it is the job of the board to determine if those votes should be counted or if the voters were not eligible at the time of the election.

If all 283 votes were deemed valid, then a minimum of 190 of those would have to be in favor of the senior levy for the measure to pass.

After the election is certified, the board plans to study how it will implement the recently passed state law that changes the number of voters in precincts in municipalities. The mandate is that each precinct must have a minimum of 500 voters. Since it is just municipalities that must meet the new requirement only Ironton, Chesapeake and South Point will be affected.

With the overhaul the county could lose between 9 to 14 precincts with the lion’s share of the cuts coming from Ironton.

“We will go through those municipalities affected by it,” McCown said. “We will debate where the new precinct lines will be. There is more to it than say lumping neighborhoods together. We are dealing with wet and dry precincts and Ironton is in two different townships and South Point in two different townships.”

Simply consolidating wet precincts or dry precincts with each other may not be possible, McCown said. However combining those precincts will not alter their classification as wet or dry.

“It is much more convoluted than let’s divide up the precincts,” he said.

Also next month the board will decide the replacement of Deputy Director Eric Bradshaw, who has applied for a disability retirement. Recently McCown and Craig Allen, BOE chair, interviewed six candidates for the post. A Democrat must fill the post since the director of the election office is a Republican.

Both parties must have equal representation on the board and in the election office. Each applicant was interviewed according to a standardized interview required by the Secretary of State.

The full board must make a decision on the replacement. There is no date set for Bradshaw’s leaving.