County residents will use voting centers for first time

Vanderburgh County residents who live outside the Evansville city limits will vote for the first time in the May 8 primary election at new voting centers.

The concept debuted during last year's city election with 15 centers. The centers enable Vanderburgh County residents to vote at any of the locations instead of only at their precinct polling centers. The primary will see the addition of seven new county locations.

Vanderburgh County Clerk Susan Kirk said she feels confident that duplicating last year's publicity efforts will inform voters about the change.

"We're just going to do like we did last year," she said about getting the word out, a year where she said everything went "just fine."

Kirk said the local media "helped out tremendously" in spreading news of new locations in print, on television and online, and she anticipates similar help this year.

She also said the candidates played a big role, as it was in their best interest that voters got to the right locations.

Kirk said candidates distributed literature that contained candidate information and vote center locations.

She expects that this year as well.

As a safeguard, Kirk said she plans to send flyers to the previous county polling places notifying voters of the new centers. She did that at previous city polling places last year, but she doesn't feel that's necessary again.

"I think the people in Evansville are savvy enough to figure this out," she said.

Kirk said no complaints from the public about the new centers came her way, and the few calls she got were questions about what the changes meant.

When asked about the long lines at popular centers like Washington Square Mall, Kirk responded: "Even with the old polling places, people had to stand in line."

Nevertheless, Kirk said election officials are going to place more voting machines and laptops with electronic poll books at city locations that proved popular or county locations expected to draw big crowds.

Other changes include the addition of one more vote center in the city and a change of location for another one.

A state law that took effect July 1, 2011, allowed local election officials to implement new voting locations.

Local election officials made the changes, and it proved to have two benefits: convenience for voters and a cost savings of about $85,000 per year for local governments.

"We had 132 polling precincts," said Kirk, adding that there was a Republican judge, a Democrat judge, a clerk for each and an inspector. "That's $500 just to pay those people to work."

Under the new system, there is an additional judge and clerk for each party, but they're at only 23 locations.

With respect to convenience, Kirk said Vanderburgh County has a mobile application that might be useful to voters.

It called "VC Election Office," and it allows voters to see locations and estimated wait times in real time.

The free application, available on Apple- or Android-based devices, was created by Mark Rolley Consulting, Inc., the company the city and county contracts with for several information technology services.

Kirk said, "We are the first county — period — to have this kind of an application." Matt Arvay, the city's chief information officer, said that's based on research by the leading geographic information systems (GIS) software company, ESRI.