While more than 100,000 Vermonters cast early ballots in this year’s primary, a steady trickle of voters still headed to polling places around the state on Tuesday morning.
In-person voting during the Covid-19 pandemic has brought unique challenges for election workers. To better comply with public health guidelines, towns and cities have moved polling places outdoors, stocked plenty of masks and hand sanitizer, and even established sites where voters don’t leave their vehicles.
“We didn’t know what the heck we were doing or what we were getting into,” said Barre City Clerk Carol Dawes, who this week turned the fieldhouse at the Barre City Auditorium into a drive-through polling place. “But basically, it seems to be working very well.”
Drivers pulled up to a check-in table to receive their ballots, then parked their cars along what would normally be the center line of the hockey rink. Then, they drove to a table near the exit, where two poll workers instructed them to reach out of their drivers’ side window to scan their ballots.
Near the penalty box, two other poll workers opened envelopes containing completed mail-in ballots, stacked them face down, and scanned them in batches on a separate tabulating machine.
Dawes said that by keeping voters in their cars, her staff didn’t have to spend as much time sanitizing surfaces or enforcing social distancing. “It’s providing that level of protection that we really wanted to make sure we had,” she said.
According to the Secretary of State’s Office, at least 18 polling places around Vermont have established drive-through voting, and at least 17 have moved their polls outside.
In Danville, voters filtered single file through the front door of the town hall, guided by election workers and staying 6 feet apart.
“We try to make sure everything is one way in, one way out,” said Town Clerk Wendy Somers, standing on the steps of the building about two hours after the polls had opened.
Somers said foot traffic had been moving at a “nice, slow, steady pace” so far. Absentee voters, though, had turned out in full force. Almost 700 people cast their vote that way, Somers said, out of the 1,749 people on her voter checklist.
For a primary, that’s a higher rate than normal, she said, and she expected full turnout to end up between 60% and 75%. The last general election here brought out 74% of voters, she said. Elections officials processed all absentee ballots last week.
Along with the atypical absentee turnout, this year’s primary also brought a new setup to Danville’s polling place: Three polling booths inside the town hall and one outside, in case a voter doesn’t have or doesn’t want to wear a mask, Somers said.
At Burlington’s Ward 5 polling place in the city’s South End, voters were vastly outnumbered by the political canvassers waiting outside the polls holding up green blue and white signs.
By about 1 p.m. on Tuesday, about 1,500 voters in the ward had cast ballots. But the vast majority of them — 1,000 — had either mailed in their ballots or dropped them off ahead of primary day.
Michael Healy, the ward’s clerk, said that several hundred additional absentee ballots had come in the mail Tuesday morning. Only about 200 people had actually come to the polling place to vote in person. Healy said that during a normal election year, that number would have been much higher.
“Those thousand people that voted ahead of time, those thousand people would have walked through,” Healy said.
Jeff Govoni said that he had been planning on voting at the polls on Tuesday and wasn’t concerned about Covid-19 because primaries typically draw low turnout.
“I’d figured we’d be able to socially distance without too much trouble,” Govoni said. “I mean, I am worried come November, and I’m planning on absentee voting for then. But not for the primaries.”
Voters in Montpelier cast their ballots inside the City Hall council chamber as usual. City Clerk John Odum said that after a 7 a.m. rush, the flow of voters was steady but quiet. He estimated that several hundred voters would cast their ballots in person on Tuesday.
Voters were dropping completed mail-in ballots in a designated dropbox at a steady rate, he said, and the number of mail-in ballots already processed was “definitely high” for a primary election — if not yet a city record.
Odum said it was “basically for certain” that in-person turnout was depressed because of the popularity of mail-in voting, but that more people opted to show up than he expected. “People like to come to the polls,” he said.
