Ithaca Public Library Polling Place

Caitlin Noerenberg


The polling place at Ithaca’s Public Library, located on 101 E. Green Street, had a good turn out this Election Day. Janis Kelly, the Republican Poll Inspector, was kind enough to inform me on different things she experienced and had to deal with through out the day.

When they opened up the polling place at 6am, there was a line of voters ready to come in and get started. Early in the morning, they also came across two Chinese students that had the assignment of coming to witness how the voting system worked in the United States, since it works so well compared to other country’s voting systems. They stayed for several hours and simply observed the process.

There are 807 registered voters in the II-4 District, which come to the Ithaca Public Library to vote. By about 4:30pm, they had well over 450 voters come out. With the polls not closing until 9pm that evening, they were pretty happy with the amount of people that had come out so far.

Later in the evening, designated poll watchers were expected to come out asking to see the lists of names of people who had already voted. The poll watchers would then go through their own lists of the registered Democrats/Republicans in the district, and see if the registered Democrats/Republicans had already voted and if not they would call and in Kelly’s words “drag them away from the TV to come and vote.”

Kelly also went over how early voting was allowed for the first time this year in some states, and over 20% of American voters, voted early before Election Day, including her. Since she had to be at the Library from 5:30am-9:30pm, she was not going to be able to make it to her own district to vote, so she voted early the day before.

Voting early entails filling out an affidavit ballot, which people also have to fill out if they have moved and it hasn’t registered with the polling places. They had approximately 12 affidavit ballots by 4:30pm. In order for the affidavit ballot to count, the information is sworn in front of one of the election inspectors, and the ballot is not signed. It goes into an envelope that has the affidavit on the outside, all of those go into the Board of Elections and then they are all opened. From there the ballots are taken out, but are still folded so that the person taking them out does not know how they voted. After that, all of the affidavit votes are counted. This all takes place after the polls close on Election Day. One p

Theres a big report that has to be filled out, an election inspector of both parties have to sign a democratic inspector and a republican inspector and have them both sign it in order to verify that the vote is fair and honest and valid, and that’s part of what establishes the credibility. Trainging to go thorugh bc the voting regulations are very complicated, fat book of inspection manual regulations,

Another interesting fact Janis Kelly informed me about was the rule that a person can not show up within 100 feet of a polling place having anything political on their clothes, flyers, or on signs etc. Every polling place has very clearly marked limits.

So far it was going pretty smoothly for the Ithaca Public Library polling place. The only problem they ran into was a woman from Hawaii that had no registered in New York to vote and had not filled out an absentee ballot for Hawaii, so she was therefore not able to vote. Out of 450 people, only 1 person was not able to vote, the polling inspectors were happy.

Janis Kelly is the City Republican Party Chair and she loved being a polling inspector. She loved being able to watch the voting system in action, and will probably be there again next year.