MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Monday starts the filing period for candidates interested in running for office in 2018, and while focus has centered on seats in the senate and house, many local positions will also be filled this year.
One U.S. Senate seat, all three U.S. House of Representatives seats, 17 state Senate seats and all 100 spots in the state House of Delegates will be up in November.
Locally, one seat Monongalia County Commission seat and three Board of Education seats will be on the ballot, as well as positions on the county’s Political Executive Committee and the Conservation District Supervisor, County Clerk Carye Blaney said.
Blaney said candidate filing runs through Jan. 27, but since that is a Saturday, interested candidates are advised not to wait until the last minute.
“Our office is not open on Saturday, we follow courthouse hours, so any person who needs to file on the local level with the county clerk’s office needs to do so in person before the 27th, or they can mail in their candidate filing, as long as it is postmarked by the 27th,” she said.
The primary election will be May 8. The general election is Nov. 6.
“We’ve been very fortunate here that we’ve always had a very large early voting turnout, and that will begin April 25 and run through May 5 for the primary election,” Blaney said.
With special elections for road bonds, school and fire levies and other single-ballot issues, elections are becoming more frequent in the Mountain State, and while Blaney said the workload is the same regardless of the number of issues on each ballot, she does believe the frequency is affecting voter turnout.
“We’ve talked about that in the past, and they call it ‘voter fatigue.’ People that have had to go to the polls so much that they just forget about it or decide not to go,” she said. “I think that we’ve seen a lot of that with the lower turnout that we’ve seen, not just here in our county but statewide and even nationally.”
Blaney said she wishes there was a proven method that works to increase voter turnout, but even with multiple efforts in Monongalia County to do so, turnout is not increasing.
“We have the easiest method of voting possible, and it’s very efficient, so we don’t have long lines,” she said. “We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve been able to get good locations in places that the majority of our population can get and out of very easily.”
The county’s new technology allows the county clerk’s office to examine demographics of those who do come out to the voting polls, which Blaney said has shown that a majority of voters are age 55 and older.
“I think when we did the general election in 2016, if we had 2,000 some people come out to vote, probably less than 50 of those were between the ages of 18 and 24,” she said. “When you see those numbers like that side by side, you can see that voters age 55 and older are consistent voters that turn out in every election.”
One plus of off-year elections is that it gives counties the chance to implement new technology before a larger election. In November, Monongalia County used new electronic equipment for the Roads to Propersity bond referedum.
“Our electronic equipment that we used worked wonderfully for our election,” Blaney said. “We have a complete system from the time you check in at the voting station, to the touch screen machine and to when you print out your card and place it in the ballot box. It’s all intergrated into one system, and it’s worked flawlessly for us.”
For more information, call the county clerk’s office at (304) 291-7230 county clerk’s office or visit www.monongaliacountyclerk.com