Brown County Auditor Cathy McNickle isn’t waiting for Aberdeen’s mayor to approve a ballot drop box plan… but she also isn’t aspiring to go big with drop boxes all over the county the way her Minnehaha County counterpart Bob Litz wanted to do. McNickle told the Brown County Commission yesterday that she’s going to plunk one ballot drop box down outside the courthouse to help us vote without dragging our virus-ridden hides indoors to contagionalize all those good county workers:
McNickle also reported to commissioners that a ballot drop box will be set up outside the Brown County Courthouse this year. Absentee voting begins Sept. 18. The ballot box will be secured to the ground, she said, the box will be monitored by security cameras and the box will be checked daily [Elisa Sand, “City, County Buildings Will Be Lit Up Wednesday,” Aberdeen American News, 2020.08.25].
Down in Minnehaha County, Litz is wimping out and settling for two outdoor boxes:
Now Litz is only going to buy two drop boxes and place them on the county administration campus, because the last election a lot of voters just dropped off their absentee ballots through two slots; one at the county administration building and another at the election headquarters.
“I couldn’t get the door open on a number of times in that last week of the election, because we got 44% of our mail-in ballots, people didn’t put them in the mail, they’d bring them down and put them in the mail drop,” Litz said.
And that made him nervous. Drop boxes, he says, will be more secure.
“I think it’s a bad optic when somebody comes up to the door of an old building with glass that thick and puts it in the slot and you can look in and see the ballots all the way across the floor,” Litz said [Don Jorgensen, “Minnehaha County Bracing for What Could Be Record Number of Absentee Ballots,” KELO-TV, 2020.08.25].
The election is coming fast, so Vote Early, and Vote Outside!