Lynchburg electoral board adds 77 new poll workers

The leap in Lynchburg’s number of registered voters means there will be 77 new poll workers in the precincts Nov. 4, the city’s electoral board decided Monday night.

More privacy booths for marking ballots will be added, along with several other adjustments to polling-place management, the board said.

Also decided — tentatively — Monday night was the question of whether voters can wear T-shirts or campaign buttons that promote their candidate.

The board said it was inclined to let registered voters cast ballots regardless of any button or shirt they may be wearing, unless the State Board of Elections issues a different ruling.

Disappointment, however, could await an estimated 200 to 300 people whose handwriting on their voter applications was so illegible or incomplete that registrar’s office personnel couldn’t find them to fix their information.

Patricia Bower, Lynchburg’s registrar, said her staff and volunteer workers were able to reach many applicants to clear up questionable forms.

Other applicants contacted the registrar when their voter card failed to show up in the mail, and “a lot of those were resolved,” Bower said. “We were able to fix the problem. But the deadline is today,” she said Monday night.

“If they call tomorrow, it’s ‘Sorry about that,’” said board member John Cobbs. Those people will be offered a new form to apply for registration in next year’s election.

Board member John Falcone said workers who processed the flood of applications told him many of the illegible forms came from Liberty University students, however Bower said there’s no way to tell whether those forms came from Liberty, because they show addresses in California or several other states. The 77 newly trained election officials will join ranks with 150 experienced poll hands to meet a need that’s expected to be high across the city, but especially high at two polling places: Heritage Elementary School and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Clay Street.

Those two precincts showed the largest increases in voter registration after Lynchburg closed its books Monday, with just over 47,000 registered voters — up 18.5 percent or 7,372 voters since January.

The Heritage Elementary precinct’s roll closed with 4,731 voters. It had about 1,900 voters before Liberty University mounted a campaign this fall to register as many students as possible.

Lynchburg College’s voting precinct at Memorial Christian Church saw an increase of 1,300 registered voters, pushing it above the 4,000 mark, Bower said.

Heritage Elementary will be staffed with 18 poll workers, up from eight in the last presidential election. “They’re going to be needed,” said Kim Conner, deputy registrar.

The school will be equipped with three computer-screen voting machines — up from two last election. The board also expects to have an entire cafeteria wall lined with voting-privacy booths for marking paper ballots, which will be scanned and counted electronically.

There will be four separate check-in lines to speed the voter traffic through the Heritage Elementary precinct.

Bower said Liberty University requested and received a list of registered voters, and also a set of instructions on how voters can verify their identity for poll workers.

The school didn’t say why it wanted the voter list, Bower said.

Falcone brought up the question of whether voters can wear shirts and buttons showing an image of their candidate.

Arelia Langhorne, the Electoral Board chairwoman, said, “The bottom line is we are going to follow the law, but we are not going to keep people from voting. We are not going to turn people away unless they are not registered to vote.”

State law prohibits people from having campaign materials inside a polling place, but members of the electoral board said they wouldn’t regard buttons and shirts as campaign materials.