Mail-in voting has grown dramatically in Centre County. A new position will oversee the process
With the number of people who vote by mail expected to increase in the coming elections, the Centre County Commissioners and salary board voted Thursday to add a new position that will focus solely on voting by mail.
Beth Lechman, director of Centre County’s elections and voter registration, said during Thursday’s salary board meeting that the coordinator will oversee the vote-by-mail process in the elections and voter registration department. That includes the annual mailings, coordinating the location of the vote-by-mail center and satellite offices, the drop box processing and any canvassing of ballots after the election, she said.
The full-time, vote-by-mail coordinator position was formally approved on Thursday, but it was already included in the 2022 county budget. Commissioner Michael Pipe credited Commissioner Steve Dershem, who was absent from the meeting, for recommending the position be included in the budget.
“I think that we like to be lean and streamlined here ... but I think in this instance it’s very important. We tried to not create too many new positions in this budget with the certain limitations we had, revenues being on the decline, but this is a position we need,” Pipe said.
The new vote-by-mail process put a “big strain” on the office, Lechman said.
“This is something that’s just going to increase and grow, and it came in at good timing with the COVID pandemic because a lot of people didn’t want to leave their homes to vote. So it helped in that instance, but it was a big burden on the office, where the staff is already doing multiple jobs, multiple tasks,” she said.
The election coordinator takes care of the petitions, campaign finance reports, public comment and programs the election equipment. Adding the additional vote-by-mail process onto that took the coordinator away from their other responsibilities, she said.
The voter registration coordinator does the voter registration and also was in charge of the mail-in and absentee ballot processing. But for one person to do 24,000 applications was “unfathomable,” Lechman said.
In previous elections, the county received between 3,000 and 5,000 ballot requests, which the clerk handled with the rest of the mail. Now, it’s up to 20,000.
Pipe said he expects that number to go up even more with the 2022 midterms.
“As we know, the governor and Senate elections can be very heated. Pennsylvania is one of the swing states and we know that it’s going to increase,” Pipe said. “We didn’t have as many vote-by-mail ballots in previous elections, because the students really didn’t kind of grasp what that was or align with it. But we’re probably going to see more of that as we come into the next few years.”
Jason Moser, the county’s controller, applauded the addition of the vote-by-mail coordinator.
“I think we’ve seen the past two years the challenges that can occur when this process is delayed, or when it takes a little bit longer than people expect it might, so to have a person in charge of that, kind of monitoring it the whole time, I think it’s a really important process moving forward, especially going into 2022,” he said.
Because the coordinator will start later in the year than what it was budgeted for, there will be a savings of $1,452. The pay will start at $19.36/hour, according to the salary board’s agenda.
