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Supervisor of Elections requests scanner, high-speed tabulator after new petition law; cites unfunded mandate
Summary
Supervisor of Elections told commissioners House Bill 1205 (effective July 1) requires expanded petition processing and asked for $9,000 for a high-speed scanner and roughly $77,000 for a high-speed tabulator and maintenance to handle larger petitions and vote-by-mail workloads.
Carol Dunaway, Jackson County supervisor of elections, asked the Board of County Commissioners to approve capital purchases for election operations tied to recent state legislation and to handle vote-by-mail processing.
Dunaway said House Bill 1205, which took effect July 1, changes how citizen initiative petitions must be processed and has increased the office’s scanning workload. She requested $9,000 for a high-speed petition scanner and a high-speed tabulator priced at $62,775 plus maintenance; she summarized the tabulator package total as about $77,000 including maintenance.
Dunaway told commissioners vote-by-mail processing is labor intensive in elections years. She said the office typically processes about 6,000 vote-by-mail ballots and hires part-time help to feed ballots; she and staff said the equipment would cut processing time and could reduce the multi-day load on staff. Dunaway also said the county’s website vendor for election-night reporting was replaced this year with ELIC Innovations after the prior vendor pulled out, which increased subscription and computer-support costs.
Dunaway said postage and communication line items increased to reflect the single election in the upcoming budget cycle and put one line (communications/postage) at $20,000 to cover vote-by-mail costs. She asked commissioners to consider the equipment as capital outlay and offered to return to the commission to explain the purchases in detail before final approval.
(Attribution: remarks by Carol Dunaway, Jackson County Supervisor of Elections.)
