Local election leaders get ready for in-person voting

FAYETTE COUNTY, Ky (WTVQ)- We are now less than a week from election day 2022. Local election leaders are gearing up for early voting, which begins tomorrow.

Election officials say the county is ready with about a thousand poll workers right now.

Pam Hill is one of the many employees that have been working the polls this week for absentee voting.

“The very first day was actually our busiest day. And we had over 100. And every day since its been a little bit less every day until today, its ticked back up,” said Hill.

Fayette County clerk Don Blevins says the poll workers have gone through required training.

“I think some folks are still worried about COVID, so they’re a little reluctant to get out in public. There’s also some people that are a little worried about the acrimony that is in politics right now. They don’t really wanna be exposed to that,” said Blevins.

But he says there is not a shortage of poll workers.

The voting machines came in Wednesday. Blevins says they will be thoroughly checked before being sent out to the election sites. They’ll also continue to be checked in the lead up to next Tuesday to make sure they aren’t tampered with.

“For example, we have to check the machines prior to event deploying them out in the field to make sure they’re reset to zero, which we’ve already done. They’re all sealed with these special numeric seals. So when they do open them up on election day, the election officers, the first thing that they do is once again verify that the machine has zero votes on it. Then they check every one of those seals to make sure that they’re integrity is still sound and the numbers match what is supposed to be on there. That way they know the machine is ready,” said Blevins.

As the attention now turns to early voting, Hill has this message for voters.

“Come prepared. We’ve found that people who have researched, they’ve done their homework, they know who they’re voting for. They’re in and out of here pretty quickly because it is a long ballot.Its two sided and it is a paper ballot. The people who have not done their research are here with us quite a while,” said Hill.

Early voting is Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 8 A.M to 4:30 P.M. at the Lexington Senior Center.