By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Mercer County voters have the option of casting their ballots at the mail box or Post Office, something the county plans to let them know about if they don’t already.
County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello on Wednesday announced applications to vote by mail would be sent to all registered voters starting the week of Aug. 1. There are some 227,000 voters in Mercer.
At a press conference from the Board of Elections conference room in Trenton, she said the idea is a way to increase voter participation. She pointed to recent examples of low turnout in Mercer of 14 percent for the June primary and of 55 percent for the presidential race in November.
“That’s a very low turnout for a presidential election,” she said.
New Jersey enacted a law, during the Corzine administration, that allows voting by mail for any reason, she said.
“You can simply vote by mail because you want to do so,” she said. “But many people are not aware that this is an option. They still believe that you have to be absent or traveling to vote by mail.”
Voters will have until Oct. 31 to submit the application to her office, but they will not have to pay the postage for sending back the form or their paper ballot.
She made clear that voting by mail is optional, not mandatory.
“If you decide you don’t want to fill out this application and mail it back in, you can still exercise your right to go to the polls and vote at your polling location,” Sollami Covello said.
She noted other counties send vote-by-mail applications to their registered voters, including Camden, Bergen and Middlesex, representing a swath of southern, northern and central parts of the state.
“And they have seen an increase in voter participation as a result,” she said.
Asked about how to guard against potential voter fraud, Bonnie Epps, county supervisor of elections, said officials would verify the information on the vote-by-mail application through the state voter registration system.
“We look up their registration, their birth date and their signature,” she said. “So if they’re registered in the system, they’re good to go.”
Freeholder vice chairwoman Lucylle R.S. Walter said county officials support Sollami Covello’s initiative. She said it would help college students and senior citizens.
For her part, Sollami Covello said she thought, ultimately, there would be Internet voting.
“But there are a lot of kinks to be worked out with that, for security purposes,” she said. “And we’re not quite there yet.”
