PELL CITY — The St. Clair County Registrar’s Office has a lot of work to do between now and next Tuesday, when the municipal election results are certified by city officials.“I’ll be working over the Labor Day weekend,” said St. Clair County Registrar Deborah Howard.
Pell City had an unprecedented number of provisional ballots in Tuesday’s municipal election. In Tuesday’s election, 185 provisional ballots were cast.
Howard said the Board of Registrar’s Office must now determine if voters who filled out provisional ballots are registered voters and are in good standing.
She said Pell City officials must determine in which district each of the voters who filled out provisional ballots resides.
Howard said the Board of Registrar’s Office and Pell City will work simultaneously on verifying the large number of provisional ballots.
“They have to be back in their hands by Tuesday at noon,” Howard said.
She said the provisional ballots arrived at the Board of Registrar’s Office at 8:05 a.m. Wednesday.
Howard said Wednesday there are several factors that contributed to the high number of provisional ballots cast in the Pell City municipal elections.
“If you were inactive in two election cycles, you were purged by the state,” she said.
Howard said verification cards were sent to the last known address of voters, and many of those cards were returned to the Registrar’s Office, undelivered. So apparently many people who were being purged from the voter’s list had changed their address, or no longer had valid post office boxes or rural route numbers.
“Some people think we automatically know when they move, but that’s not the case,” Howard said. “We don’t know when they move, unless they contact our office.”
She said the Board of Registrar’s Office also has new computers, and the old computer system did not communicate with the new computer system when voters were initially identified and taken off the inactive voters’ list.
Howard said the computer change happened only about one year ago.
She said 90 percent of the voters who had to fill out provisional ballots were not on the voter’s list because of bad addresses.
Howard said ultimately it’s the voters’ responsibility to ensure they are on the voter’s list before an upcoming election. That is done by a simple phone call to the Board of Registrar’s Office at (205) 594-2126.
The municipal elections had low voter turnout, with only about one-fourth of the registered voters in Pell City participating in Tuesday’s election. About 2,120 people voted in the Pell City municipal elections Tuesday. There are about 8,000 registered voters in Pell City.
The number of voters to participate in the municipal elections was also about one-third less than the last municipal election in 2004. In the 2004 municipal election, 3,172 Pell City residents voted.
