Some voters don’t have poll to go to on election day

DRUMMOND When the Drummond school district holds its bond election Tuesday, only three people in nearby Kingfisher County will be eligible to vote.

But if those voters show up to the polls on election day, they’ll be out of luck.

Nearly all of the northwest Oklahoma school district is located in Garfield County, but the boundaries also include small parts of Kingfisher and Major counties. Voters in the district will consider a $200,000 transportation bond issue on Tuesday.

But for this election, district officials closed a few voting precincts where only a few residents are registered to vote. Those voters still will be allowed to cast a ballot, but they’ll need to do so by mail or by voting early at their county courthouses, Drummond schools Superintendent Mike Woods said.

“Everyone still has the right and the

ability to vote,” Woods said. “They do not miss the opportunity to vote at all.”

Officials at the Oklahoma Election Board say the practice of closing underutilized precincts on election days isn’t common, but it isn’t unheard of, especially in rural areas.

This isn’t the first time the district has closed voting precincts on election day, Woods said. The practice has become more common over the past six years as a way for the district to save money, he said. Although county election boards pay for the cost of opening precincts, they pass those costs along to districts, he said

Only a handful of residents are registered to vote at the district precincts in Major and Kingfisher counties, Woods said. Opening those precincts would mean paying three people to staff the polls for 12 hours while, in all likelihood, no one will show up to vote, he said. That’s a major financial burden for small districts like Drummond, Woods said.

District and county officials also have had little luck finding anyone to staff those precincts, Woods said.

Bryan Dean, a spokesman for the state Election Board, said school districts may opt to close any precinct where fewer than 100 voters are registered. In those cases, the county election board must notify those voters by mail, he said.

“It’s done fairly often,” Dean said.

Precincts most commonly are closed in school elections in rural, sparsely populated areas, Dean said. Those districts may include a large geographical area, he said, but might have relatively few voters in any single precinct.

It’s even more common among districts that cross county lines or where precincts are split, Dean said. Unlike legislative districts and municipalities, school district boundaries don’t follow precinct lines, he said. So in some cases, a precinct may have hundreds of registered voters, but only a few of those residents might be eligible to vote in a school board race or bond election.