BRAZOS COUNTY, Texas — With early voting a few weeks away, Brazos County Election officials are worried they might not be able to keep up with a new Texas Mandate forcing them to double their polling locations.
A new Texas Law allows counties to let voters cast ballots at any polling place while also permitting counties to consolidate the number of voting locations offered.
And Elections Administrator, Trudy Hancock, is struggling to find these 25 new sites.
“Other than being available they also have to be ABA compliant they have to have sufficient space for us to be able to set up for voting and those are just really hard to find,” Hancock said.
Along with the location issue, Hancock says they also need over $100,000 to get more voting equipment for these new polling locations, which might not be ready in time.
Brazos County Democratic Party Chair, Thomas Cavaness explained, “The county election office has purchased eight new machines which would get us to 32 voting locations on Election Day however, for the primary, we’re only going up to 28, an additional four from where we’ve been.”
Every year, parties struggle to find election workers, but this year might prove to be the most difficult.
“So, it’s just a numbers game trying to recruit enough people to fill those new locations. We’ll need at least four additional workers and if that location ends up being busy, we’ll need six workers. Right now, we have four locations, so at least four at every location, so that’s 16 additional people, and we always have trouble finding election workers,” Hancock finalized.
For more information on voting locations just head over to their website.
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