Paradise election judges, swamped by turnout, need more voting machines and help

By Brooke Nelson

December 13, 2004 | PARADISE -- November's presidential election drew a deeply divided electorate to the voting polls in recently unprecedented numbers, and Cache County citizens were no exception as this year's voter registration and turnout broke county records.

Kim Gardner, an employee at the Cache County Clerk's office, said the November 2004 election saw an increase of more than 11,000 registered voters countywide as compared to the November 2000 election. Voter turnout of registered voters also increased from 39.8 percent in 2002 to 62.4 percent in 2004, she said. While voter turnout is always expected to be higher in a presidential election when compared with other election years, Gardner said the increase was still unusual. "It was such a close race," she said.

However close the election may have been on a national level, it was anything but narrow on a local level. Gardner said 81.76 percent of Cache County citizens voted Republican.

Things were no different in the southern Cache County town of Paradise.

Peggy Sanders, a Paradise resident of 28 years who has assisted as a voting judge in Paradise for the past 11 elections, said voter turnout was overwhelming to the town's voting station.

<> "I think most people just wanted to make sure that [John F.] Kerry didn't win. It's mainly Republican out here," said Diane Roundy, another one of Paradise's volunteer voting judges.

"I think the war was paramount in their thinking," Sanders said of voters. "But the economy was a big issue here because so many of our citizens rely on the government for jobs -- especially Thiokol and Hill Air Force Base."

Whatever their reasons for voting, Paradise residents did so in much higher numbers than in past elections. Gardner said no statistics were available in 2000 specific to Paradise, but in this year's election 1,070 people voted. That's more than 100 votes higher than the 2002 turnout of 910.

Sanders said she estimated a 60 percent increase in turnout of registered voters over past presidential elections.

"We always have the senior citizens, and usually the stay-at-home moms come out and vote, but this year we saw an awful lot of young people," Sanders said. "There were a lot of young married couples, who had never voted before, and who in the past probably didn't think voting was very important."

Gardner said seeing so many young voters is unusual in a small town like Paradise and is representative of how strongly people felt about the candidates.

Roundy said she feels the large amounts of coverage the election got from the media this year influenced the number of young voters. However, young voters weren't the only ones turning out in unusually high numbers, Sanders said.

"We opened at 7 a.m. and at a quarter to seven, we had a line out the door," she said. "Between the three of us we only counted three minutes during the day when we could take a break."

The county came by at noon, Sanders said, with about 45 absentee ballots for the judges to count when they had a break, Sanders said, "But we never got a breath."

The lack of downtime led to Paradise to be the very last voting district to turn in their ballots to the county, Sanders said. Final counts were driven into Logan around 1 a.m., Roundy said.

Larger turnouts than expected from citizens in the county areas surrounding Paradise also led to some problems, Roundy said. About half of the people who voted at the Paradise voting station were from unincorporated areas, and were required to vote on a different ballot than Paradise residents. The county had only provided one machine for those voters, causing some people to stand in line for over two hours.

Eventually a county employee came with another county ballot machine, containing a question about the mosquito abatement district, easing wait time for some county voters, Sanders said. However, the machine took up one of the only three Paradise machines, turning one problem into another, she said.

Sanders said she thinks the county will send more machines and help to the small town for the next election.

"We were overwhelmed. We really needed another judge," she said, adding Paradise is an important nucleus for many of the people living in surrounding areas.

Despite the wait, Sanders said she doesn't think people were discouraged. Sanders said she thinks young voters were especially empowered by the experience.

"I think they were proud to do it," she said. "It's good they hung in there."

NW MK