Published: April 16, 2008 11:19 pm         

County takes election to ISU

Students will be able to vote on campus for two weeks

TERRE HAUTE — A temporary satellite voting site will be placed on the campus of Indiana State University by next week under an agreement with the university.

The site will be at ISU’s Cunningham Memorial Library and will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. The voting site will be open only for two weeks, from Monday to April 25 and April 28 to May 2.

The Vigo County Election Board on Wednesday passed a resolution to approve the site for ISU’s campus.

“They have graduation on May 3, so it has to be done quickly,” said County Clerk Patricia Mansard. ISU administers final exams from April 28 to May 2.

“We are trying to do it with very little, if any, cost to the county,” Mansard said.

“It will help these young people who have registered to start voting. One of the things that we know is that if people don’t start voting when they are young, they may never vote. It is a habit that people get into, so we are trying to do all we can to encourage them and seems to be real interest at [ISU],” Mansard said.

Vigo County has three other satellite voting sites — at The Meadows, Plaza North Shopping Center and Southland Shopping Center. Voters can cast an early absentee ballot at each of these sites until noon May 5.

ISU rests in voting precinct 5C, which has 1,091 voters, with 59 additional voters “pending,” meaning they are to be processed into the Statewide Voter Registration System, an electronic database that simultaneously links all of Indiana’s 92 county's voter registration records.

Debbie Kirk, director of the Vigo County Voter Registration office, said the 59 voters will be eligible to vote, possibly today. Kirk said several hundred voters in 5C were removed from voting rolls, with many more than that added back into the precinct from recent presidential get-out-the-vote efforts. About 100 of those voters are registered at Deming Center, which also is in 5C precinct, she said.

Many of the new voter registration records, obtained as part of a concert ticket giveaway to see Dave Matthews perform in Bloomington, contained fictitious names and addresses and had to be removed, Kirk said

Vigo County now has 76,249 registered voters, plus an additional 1,422 pending to the Statewide Voter Registration System. Kirk said she does not know how many of those voter registrations are new or are simply transfers from other addresses.

Still, the numbers are up from 75,784 registered voters counted as of late March, Kirk said.

Statewide, more than 4.2 million voters were registered in Indiana as of April 10, the Indiana Secretary of State’s office reports.

More than 52,000 applications still were pending. Since the 2006 general election, 332,679 Hoosiers have added their names to the voter registration rolls, including more than 150,000 since the start of this year, according to the Secretary of State’s office.

The state’s new registration system has allowed the removal or inactivation of about 600,000 records from voter rolls in the state’s 92 counties, which would otherwise lead to inaccurate voter participation results.

Howard Greninger can be reached at (812) 231-4204 or howard.greninger@tribstar.com

     

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