MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Monongalia County’s roughly 45,000 active registered voters should keep an eye on their mailboxes in the coming days, County Clerk Carye Blaney said.
New plastic voter registration cards with a magnetic strip and a barcode will be mailed today. She said the cards will come in an envelope with a return address of the County Clerk’s Office. It will be marked as election mail and Blaney said she doesn’t want voters to overlook it since it’s the height of campaign season.
“I wanted to find a solution to help our poll works be able to more accurately check-in our voters when they appear to vote,” she said.
The new registration cards will integrate with the electronic poll book, Blaney said. She explained the electronic poll book is the tablet poll workers use to check-in voters.
“We’re the only county in the nation, to my knowledge, that has put a magnetic strip and barcode on a voter registration card,” Blaney said.
She said she spent several years trying to find a jurisdiction that did something similar so she didn’t need to re-invent the wheel, but couldn’t.
Chapman Printing, a local vendor, was willing to work with her until the cards were “exactly the way we needed them to be,” she said.
The project doesn’t have a final cost yet, but Blaney said the cards were about $20,000.
The cards will help to prevent human error when checking voters in at the polls, she said. Each card’s data is uniquely linked to a single voter so there is no opportunity for human error. As an example, Blaney said in the past, John Doe Sr. could vote, but John Doe Jr. may get the credit for voting.
That type of problem wasn’t common, but with the new system there is one less chance at a mistake, she said.
Getting the cards to voters in time for November’s election was a goal, Blaney said. Voters who don’t have the card, can still vote by showing a driver’s license or old paper voter registration card, she said.
Tuesday was the last day for West Virginians to register to vote for the upcoming election. Blaney said her office has been processing about a 150 registrations a day, a typical volume for a midterm election.
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