General election wind up

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – The General election in Kentucky is now less than two weeks away, and the counties have been preparing themselves for the task of supplying ballots and counting them in a secure manner.

After much national tumult resulting from the 2020 presidential election, many county clerks and even polling workers find themselves under scrutiny. This election in Kentucky is predicted to be a very tight race, but in Warren and Edmonson counties, the clerks say they are ready.

Warren County clerk Lynette Yates has been working with poll workers in order to train them on who gets any of the 99 different ballots available at all polling places in the county. Warren decided to maintain the Pandemic era practice of allowing all of its residents to vote at any of the available polling locations. It was decided that this model worked much better for the county residents, and so they kept it around.

“It’s more convenient for our voters because, you know, people are in town working or they’re in various areas of the county. And when it was precinct level voting with the size of county that we have, you had to plan your day around voting,” Yates said.

In rural Edmonson County, where the population is much smaller, Edmonson County clerk Kevin Alexander says that many people work in other counties, and thus they decided that leaving the precinct model in place worked better. Not only does it require less expenditure for the county, but there are not as many ballots at play as in a more suburban county like Warren, meaning the process of casting and counting is much more streamlined, also, the residents seem to prefer it this way.

“Their regular polling places worked fine before, and it seemed to work fine. We talk to people in different location before we made that decision. After COVID, decided to leave it the way it was before. That’s the reason that we did that,” Alexander said.

With the election drawing near, Yates is working diligently to ensure that each polling location in Warren County is staffed and ready to operated for election day and early voting.

There are still a few spots open for election workers, and she encourages anyone who is interested to come to a training program and take part in the voting process. She says it is not necessarily the same people who have always done it, but a smattering of the diverse set of backgrounds that exist in Warren County.

“We actually have more people wanting to work, early voting than Election Day. We have our staff for Election Day, but we would like to see a little larger alternate list in case people were to call in or something were to happen. We’d like to be able. So if you know, if anyone wants to work Election Day, we still have some trainings,” Yates said.