Now that the filing deadline has passed for all county-wide positions, Election 2022 is in full swing.

With signs posted at nearly every intersection, hoping to catch the eye of potential voters, where and when do Clinton Countians cast their vote?

Clinton County Clerk Nathan Collins cleared up some details about the May Primary, as well as the General Election in November.

This year, as was during the election in 2020, there will be three sites where voters can cast their votes.

One will be the South Kentucky RECC office located in the Snow Community of Clinton County. Another location will be the Welcome Center, located on North U.S. 127, and the third spot will be at the Community Center next to Albany United Methodist Church.

Anyone who is a registered voter can vote at any of the three locations listed above.

Collins said there a few reasons as to why there are only three voting sites, as opposed to voting in certain precincts.

“Last year House Bill 574 passed and that changed a lot of the election laws,” Collins said. “All voting equipment in the state has to have a paper audit trail verified … which means there has to be a paper trail of every vote. Our old machines were all digital, so there wasn’t a paper trail of each vote. With these new machines, there is a paper for every vote.”

The bill also made it a law where counties can turn precincts into voting centers.

“The third thing was it allowed three days of early voting,” Collins said. “People can vote three days prior to Election Day, so the Thursday, Friday and Saturday before Election Day on that following Tuesday. It will be the same three locations on all four of those days.”

Collins said in 2020, the state board of elections purchased voting machines for Clinton County to accommodate the paper trail verification.

“They provided us with six machines,” Collins said. “It will be the same machines people used in 2020. They only purchased enough for us to open three voting centers. If we want to purchase the rest of the equipment to open all the precincts, and have enough equipment to have two people voting at one time, it’s going to cost the county in upwards of more than $100,000.”

In addition to spending the money on extra voting machines, Collins said some of the precinct voting structures were in bad shape and likely needed to be rebuilt and that responsibility would be on the county to maintain those voting houses.

“They are falling apart,” Collins said. “They have cracks in the foundations and cracks in the walls, they flood … they are not in good shape.”

Collins believes voting in Clinton County will remain in the three voting centers for the future.

“If the county wants to eventually purchase enough to open all the precincts then technically they can do that next time unless something changes in the next legislature,” Collins said. “I think people liked it in 2020 from what I’ve heard. We had a big turnout and it was still successful. There wasn’t long lines.”

Collins said it’s also easier to get the results to the public coming from three locations as opposed to the 13 precincts in the county.

“If there is a problem, it’s much easier to send a technician to one of three places instead of 25 minutes away,” Collins said.

Another advantage to having the three voting centers is most of the precincts weren’t fully handicap accessible, where as the three voting centers are.

“Some of them (precincts) are not in handy locations for handicapped people,” Collins said. “Absentee voting is back to having to have an excuse. In 2020, Covid-19 was the excuse, but now it’s not. It’s back to the usual excuses, which are sickness, out of town, and so on. I think the people will like it this way.”

Collins said the County Board of Elections in Clinton County all voted unanimously to have the election this way.

That board consist of Republican Commissioner Willard Johnson, Nathan Collins, Sheriff Jeff Vincent and Democratic Commissioner Steve Clark.

“I think this will work well … just like it did in 2020, but the option is always there to purchase all the equipment,” Collins said.