It's officially November, and with midterm elections only days away, election offices nationwide are taking extra precautions to ensure a smooth sailing election day. That’s including Ada County, who wants to assure voters there will be no election mishaps, like the small ones they had in the primary elections.
"We've ordered 100% ballots for all registered voters. That doesn't even include the additional ones that are being used right now for early and absentee voting," said Ada County Chief Deputy Clerk, Phil McGrane.
An extra step being taken in Ada County to make sure November 6th runs like clockwork, literally, getting voters in and out in a timely manner, without having to wait any extra time on preventable matters.
"We had really high turnout in the primary election. Really unprecedented turnout overall for both parties, but especially in the Democratic primary," said McGrane.
Which led to ballot shortages, causing democratic voters to have to wait just a little bit longer for more ballots to be delivered.
"We're expecting much higher turnout for this election, just on every indicator that we've seen. We think it could get up to 70%, that's really high for a midterm election," said McGrane.
With the midterm election 4 years ago only seeing a 56% voter turnout.
"We have an open governors seat, that's a really big deal. We have two citizen initiatives on the ballot, that's a really big issue," said McGrane.
And with an election this large, ensuring secure voting seems an even higher importance than normal. Ada County hired a cybersecurity firm two years ago to test for vulnerabilities in their election systems and luckily didn’t find any.
"We're really happy to report we didn't have any vulnerabilities. And that's largely because in Idaho we have a paper ballot for voting, so we can always refer back to the original ballot," said McGrane.
In order to beat the November 6th line altogether, the last day for early voting is Friday, November 2nd.
