Absentee ballots available for North Dakotans
BISMARCK, N.D. - North Dakota’s general election is a month away, but hundreds of people are already clamoring to mark their ballots early, an option that has become more popular with each election.
“ Right now we’re conducting two elections,” Burleigh County Auditor Kevin Glatt said. “There’s an election on Election Day, a normal election and a mail ballot election. That’s what we’re doing.”
Glatt’s office sent out more than 500 absentee ballots last week. In Grand Forks County, almost 400 have been mailed, Auditor Debbie Nelson said.
Any eligible North Dakota voter may request an absentee ballot application from their local county auditor shortly after they become available in mid- to late September.
Absentee voting allows North Dakotans to mark their ballots at their leisure and mail them in. They also may visit their county's courthouse to vote before the election is held.
“ I think it’s a great option,” said Jason Stverak, the director of North Dakota’s Republican Party. “It helps people make sure that their voices will be heard.”
Both the state Republican and Democratic parties recently sent absentee ballot application mailings to their supporters, encouraging them to vote before Nov. 7.
Stverak credits GOP Public Service Commissioner Tony Clark’s narrow victory in the 2000 election in part to Clark's edge among absentee voters.
Clark, who is seeking re-election this year against Democrat Cheryl Bergian, defeated Vern Thompson by only 1,059 votes to win his first PSC term in 2000.
An Election Day snowstorm that hampered voters in some Democratic-leaning rural areas helped tip the election to Clark, party activists say.
Jim Fuglie, the state Democratic director, said he was planning to vote early himself.
Restrictions on absentee voting were loosened almost a decade ago. The Legislature abolished a requirement that North Dakotans who chose to vote absentee had to give a reason why they needed to do so.
In the 2004 general election, 16.1 percent of the North Dakotans who voted did so before Election Day, accounting for 51,116 of the 316,049 ballots cast.
Glatt says the process is more accurately described as voting by mail.
Auditors in rural counties say the absentee option is gaining more acceptance, as voters become familiar with it.
Voting by mail eliminates the need for rural voters to drive long distances on Election Day, auditors say. The number of polling places in rural areas has also shrunk in recent years, in part because of the cost of equipping extra polling places with special voting machines.