BARNSTABLE – As Election Day approaches, Barnstable Town Clerk Ann Quirk said that her office has been working hard to overcome challenges imposed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
To deal with the influx of mail-in votes and ensure her office will not be counting thousands of ballots on November 3, Quirk said that she currently has three full time and one part-timer on staff to assist in tabulating ballots before the election.
She said that she also has about 30 other poll workers who are volunteering to assist in the process, working on rotation.
“It is a monumental effort to get all these ballots out and back again,” Quirk said.
“Most of us have been working 7 to 7 every day, trying to just get the work done and get the ballots out, and once they come back; get them into the system so that we know that we have them.”
She said that over half of the early ballots that have been sent out have now been returned.
Quirk said that the expansion of early and mail-in voting has been a challenge for every town clerk in every town this year, and that many older systems that were not originally designed with the huge volume of early-voting in mind are being used to tabulate ballots.
Quirk said her office has learned from the Primary Election, where she had several people and five machines counting ballots beginning at 8 am in the morning and was only able to finish at 9 pm.
“This time around, because we have even more ballots that have gone out, we’ve started to do the advance depositing of the ballots into the tabulators. We don’t see any of the results. We’re starting precinct by precinct just trying to get the bulk of these early voted ballots into the tabulators so they can hold the information until we can print it off after 8 o’clock on election night,” said Quirk.
Her office is also facing difficulties from other places besides just volume of early votes, including anxious voters concerned that their ballot is not showing in the Secretary of State’s Track My Ballot system calling her office and taking time away from other tasks.
Quirk said that her office is keeping pace with the volume, partly because of the excellent record keeping her office is performing.
Quirk also said that despite the challenges created by changes to the ways people vote amid an election year hit hard by COVID-19, she is pleased by the increase in voter turnout likely due to the new options in voting available.
“I love the fact that we’re able to give people chances to vote in more than one way. I’m thrilled that there’s so many people who want to vote. I can tell you now, we have more voters in Barnstable than I’ve had since I’ve been in this position, because we’re up over 35,000 voters now,” said Quirk.
“People are really getting more involved in our voting and that, I find, is the best thing. It really is, because they need to do it. They need to vote. But this has to be streamlined in a way that every office can handle it.”
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