Carter County cast a total of 4,031 votes in the 2022 primary election.
That’s down a little over previous years. A quick look back over our previous election stories shows that in 2020 the total number of primary voters were up quite a bit. But that was also a presidential election year, numbers are always up in those years.
In addition, Kentucky allowed anyone to vote absentee, they extended voting hours, and generally improved access to vote during the pandemic. While that meant the counts were more complicated – we didn’t have a final count until late June – the total number of voters participating was much higher, by more than 900 after all votes were counted.
If you look back at 2018 they were a little lower than 2020, at just over 4,500 total votes cast, but still significantly higher than in 2022.
So, what hurt voting this year? For one thing, it’s a mid-term election.
Mid-terms, and especially primaries, are notoriously less well attended than years with presidential elections. Primaries usually don’t draw the same crowds as general elections either.
Still, there is no denying that the voting numbers are down and, when you get out into the county, there is a perception among some that the move to four polling places was an intentional choice designed to limit voter participation outside of the two city centers.
Pam Irick, at Buffalo Market, said she knew of at least nine people in the Carter City area who directly told her they didn’t vote because it wasn’t convenient to get into Grayson or Olive Hill to do so, even with the early voting options.
Others cited lingering concerns about COVID-19 and having to stand in line with folks who may or may not be masking. This was particularly a concern of some elderly voters who – despite vaccination and other safety precautions – still worry about their health.
Still others cited high gas prices, and the long treks into town.
Irick said some of her customers felt like the county was intentionally making it difficult for elderly voters to get to the polls, and though not everyone was as willing as Irick to go on record, complaints about the limited polling places weren’t hard to find.
The county clerk’s office noted that limiting the number of polling places to four was the decision of the election board for this year, and that it was largely based on the difficulty with getting enough poll workers to staff polling places in every voting district.
But even if polling places needed to be limited to four, critics of this year’s polling place selection noted that they weren’t evenly spaced throughout the county. Instead, they were clustered in the two cities, with two voting locations in Grayson and the other two in Olive Hill.
If the election board had wanted to encourage participation, they said, they would have at the very least taken one of those polling places from each of the cities and put them out where they could be more accessible to rural voters.
Irick suggested moving one to Carter City, and one to Denton or Rush, so that the folks on the periphery of the county didn’t have to travel so far. If not those exact locations, she said, the election board could have still chosen polling places in the county that were more evenly spaced and more accessible for those who couldn’t easily travel into town.
Or, as another suggested, they could have located all four polling places at the four corners of the county, and required those in Grayson and Olive Hill to go out into the county to vote, instead of making the county come to them.
While that’s obviously not the best way to increase overall voter turnout – the cities are population centers with more voters, so making it more difficult for city residents to vote could decrease total participation – it does point out the difficulties associated with travelling to vote. If moving all the polling places into the county could hurt turnout from city voters, it stands to reason that requiring everyone to come into the city to vote could have a similar impact on county voters.
While we don’t support the notion that the election board’s move was intentionally designed to disenfranchise elderly voters, we understand their frustration. In the future, the board needs to do better to meet the needs of all Carter County voters. Not just those who live in town.
