2017 FILE PHOTO — A voter drops in his ballot in 2017.
It’s the end of an era in Ridgefield when it comes to elections. Last week’s races were the last to feature a longtime polling place at the Ridgefield Church of the Nazarene as changes in state law have forced the hands of counties who need to play catch-up.
Around lunchtime on Election Day several individuals were trickling into the church, casting their ballots in person for the last time. Some voters coming in opined of the imminent loss of their polling location; many who have been coming to the church for years.
Elections volunteer Tom Humphrey said that for the church location there was a dedicated core of people that vote in every election.
“The only thing that is going to keep them from voting is severe illness or they’re not in the country at the time,” Humphrey said.
The core group tends to be older, 50 years plus, which he said was due to those generations’ concepts of civic duty — going to the polls was part of the ritual.
Humphrey, along with fellow volunteer Clara Lacy, were manning the polling location, which they had done for some 20 years, only occasionally moving from the church’s location for school bond votes.
As to why the Nazarene church location is closing, state legislation this year has mandated unmanned ballot drop boxes based on population and census designation. As previously reported in The Reflector, Senate Bill 5472 makes a requirement that counties “must establish a minimum of one ballot drop box for each 15,000 registered voters in the county and in each city, town, and census-designated place in the county that has a post office,” according to an official summary of the bill.
Initially, Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey had tried to make sure the Church of the Nazarene location remained open. However, when the legislation was signed it changed priorities in the Auditor’s office as finding a way to deal with the mandate of more boxes was of a greater priority for the county office than maintaining pop-up locations.
According to a report at the time by the Washington Secretary of State’s Office, Clark County would need an additional 13 ballot boxes to meet that mandate.
With priorities shifted, the Church of the Nazarene pop-up location was axed, much to the disappointment of both longtime voters and the longtime volunteers.
Counties had the option of exclusively doing vote-by-mail in 2005, according to information from the Washington Secretary of State. The shift was one of many Humphrey has seen in his tenure as another step in the “dehumanization” of Clark County, something made more apparent by the loss of an in-person polling place.
“To me, this has been a systematic elimination in the electoral process,” Humphrey remarked. Apart from the loss of what to many is an elections ritual, he also questioned the integrity of voting strictly by ballot boxes.
“There’s nobody standing there to say how many ballots you can drop in that box,” Humphrey said.
Apart from now-formerly hosting election dropoffs, the church itself was a lynchpin of the community, Humphrey said, holding get-togethers, classes and recreation in the city.
Humphrey said his service as an elections volunteer was part of a patriotic duty, likening the defense of the voting process through monitoring polling to defense of the country as a whole, noting a sworn oath to protect the Constitution from all threats, “foreign and domestic.”
“I’m registered as an independent. I have been a Democrat. I have been a Republican. I have been both at the same time before because I had to to keep the process moving along,” Humphrey said. “That’s how important it is to me.
