Howard County Election Director Guy Mickley’s numbers already didn’t look good. Within a day, they grew bleaker.
Mickley started Monday with 491 people signed on to serve as election judges Nov. 3, about a third of what he needed. By the time the county election board met at 4 p.m., that number had dropped by 12. Judges were calling to pull back their pledges to participate, he explained, as the coronavirus pandemic waged on.
“We are not going to recruit 700 people. It’s not going to happen,” Mickley told the election board. “We cannot sustain 90 individual polling places with judges like this.”
Moments later, the board unanimously approved Mickley’s proposal to slash the number of polling places in Howard to 35.
