Boone County residents should double check their polling place before going to vote. The Boone County Clerk said she expects over 80,000 people to vote in this election. In an effort to deal with the large amount of voters, Boone County added 36 new polling places since the Missouri primary in March.
Residents should have received a notice of election through the mail or email. The notice contains their polling place, a sample ballot and their correct residential address. Boone County Clerk Wendy Noren said if a resident’s address is not correct and they don’t update it, Missouri law won’t allow them to vote.
“The number one thing people need to do before Election Day is if they did not get their sample ballot mailing, they can go to our website, they can look up their record, they can see whether their address is correct,” Noren said. “That’s the number one reason why people don’t get it [the notice of election], they don’t update their address with us.”
Residents can update their address until 3 p.m. on Election Day. Noren said the process to change an address is probably one of the easiest in the country. All residents have to do to update their address is either go online or call the Boone County Clerk’s office. Turnaround time for address changes is about 24 hours, but on Election Day, the process is even faster.
Noren said it has always been a struggle in the community to remind people to update their address and keep their records current. Many Boone County residents wait until the last minute to do so.
“We will have probably 4,000 people on Tuesday who have waited until Election Day to update their address,” Noren said. “We have to set up this entire infrastructure to deal with that number of people. Everything we do has a paper back up system, but people who don’t update their address aren’t on the paper listing and they inconvenience themselves.”
Noren said the addition of new polling places will help voters by cutting down the time they have to wait to actually vote.
Noren said many voting places also have to change because old polling spots don’t want their facility used anymore.
“I can’t force private property owners to become a polling place,” Noren said. “I am very grateful to the churches, to the service organizations that allow us to use their sites. But, they aren’t required by law to do it, so we’re a little bit at the mercy sometimes of where we can place these things.”
There is a central polling place in the same building as the Boone County Clerk office. However, Noren said she recommends only using this facility if a resident can’t make it to their correct polling place before voting ends or if they’re having problems with their registration records.