Champaign County voters are, once again, encountering extremely long lines at polling locations. The local election authority, County Clerk Aaron Ammons, says the voters are to blame.
Yesterday afternoon, the early voting line at the Brookens Administrative Center snaked around a gymnasium and extended down a long hallway, with a wait time of well over two hours. Some voters left without being able to cast their votes.
Another voting location at Meadowbrook Church on South Duncan Road also had a long line. An election volunteer at that location said she couldn’t be sure how long the wait would be, but we estimate it to be well over an hour.
The reason for the long wait times was an inability by election staff to hand out ballots efficiently. At Brookens, for example, they could only produce one ballot every few minutes. This left the roughly twenty voting booths almost entirely empty, while nearly a hundred people waited for their turn to get a ballot.
Check CU spoke with Clerk Ammons at his office the same day, asking if he realized that there was more than a two hour wait even during early voting. Ammons became immediately defensive, saying that the voters had forty days to vote early, but that most people still waited until the last two days. Ammons argued that if residents hadn’t waited so long, there wouldn’t be long wait times.
Ammons seemed fully aware of the likelihood for high voter turnout similar to recent elections, but he quickly discarded the idea that he could add more staff to speed up the process. Instead, Ammons repeatedly rebuked the voters for not voting earlier.
After learning that we were planning to write an article on the issue, Ammons became upset and refused to engage any further, saying “I don’t have time for this”.
While early voting is a convenience for some people, other voters may want to allow the campaign process to run its full course before making their decisions. Presidential candidate Donald Trump, for example, made his biggest campaign appearance just 10 days ago on the Joe Rogan podcast. The three-hour long interview has been viewed over 45 million times – around ten times the viewership that is received by major network TV stations.
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris made on appearance on Saturday Night Live just three days ago. Less than a month ago, Harris increased her public exposure substantially, appearing on numerous venues, including The View, the Howard Stern radio program, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Voters would have missed a lot of new information if they voted up to 40 days early.
Unfortunately, it seems that long wait times at the polls is increasingly becoming a normal and acceptable phenomenon. Yesterday, upon learning that the wait time would be over two hours, one voter in line responded, “Oh, only two hours?”.
It is Check CU’s position that every citizen should be able to vote easily and without discouragement. Elected officials should be held accountable for their refusal to make proper arrangements for voter turnout. It would take a relatively small amount of additional resources to increase the opportunity made available to voters during the final days into election day.