By Lamin Njie
Travis County spent a staggering 6.9 million dollars on new locations and other measures to ensure safe voting for its over 850,000 registered voters, the county’s election officer has said.
US state of Texas has over 250 counties and Travis County is one of them with 852,000 registered voters.
According to Dana DeBeauvoir, election officer for the county a normal presidential election in her county cost about 2.2 million but the coronavirus pandemic meant the county spent three times that amount.
“We are spending 6.9 million for this election and it’s all new locations, extra people, better training, PPEs, more equipment, everything we can do to try and make voters experience inside the polling stations as safe as possible and to offer as many other options for voters as we can so that whatever position they’re in they can still vote,” she said as voting got underway in Texas.
The county had 178 voting centres and in-person voters started lining as early as 7am Tuesday to vote. The polls closed in Texas at 7pm.
According to the county’s election officer, they made sure people voted safely by putting in place all the necessary precautions.
“We have redesigned all of our polling places and voters will find many new locations that are larger so that we were able to socially distance inside, not only the voters but also the voting booths. We have PPEs for voters, and we have done a lot of education and training on how the election workers could protect themselves,” DeBeauvoir said.
She added: “So everybody in the polling station wears a mask, everybody is socially distanced, inside and outside. And the voters are given PPEs so that they never actually touched any of the equipment.
“It’s contact-less and I think that’s one of the main things we done here. We tried to make in-person voting as safe as you can possibly be, to try to take some of the fear out of it because Covid makes people uncomfortable, with good reason for showing up in-person.
“We’ve also seen a huge increase in mail balloting. You can qualify for mail balloting in Texas if you’re in one of four categories. One of the categories is over 65. So a lot of those folks who never voted by mail before even though they qualified are now participating.”
