Ballot drop boxes were a hit with voters. Sedgwick County plans to keep using them.
Streetside ballot boxes are here to stay, a lasting legacy and one of the rare silver linings in a year overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman said the secured boxes, where voters could turn in their mail ballots 24-7, were one of the biggest success stories of the 2020 election.
“It was wildly popular with the public,” she said. “It did exactly what it was supposed to do.”
And she said she’s looking forward to using them for years to come.
“As long as we can keep permission from the locations to have the boxes there, they will be there,” Lehman said.
Since all the boxes are on city or county property, permission is not likely to be an issue.
Lehman said she plans to use the boxes for all future elections, but in some cases they won’t all be opened.
For small local elections, she’ll only open them in the jurisdictions where people are actually eligible to vote, she said.
Placed at parks and public buildings in Wichita and the county’s smaller cities, the boxes were a response to two of the main worries surrounding the election earlier this month: COVID-19 and Postal Service performance.
On the COVID front, thousands of voters were worried about possibly being exposed to the deadly virus standing in line or inside their regular polling place.
Others were concerned that cutbacks in Postal Service overtime and equipment made by U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy would result in ballots being delivered too late to be counted.
Enter the drop box.
Voters who dropped off their ballots there didn’t have to interact with anyone in person, negating the COVID threat.
And because election-office workers were emptying the boxes each night, the voters didn’t have to worry about their ballots getting lost or delayed.
“It gave people an easy way to drop their ballot off where they knew it was coming directly to us, without having to either wait on the Post Office or go into a polling location or into our office,” Lehman said.
Sedgwick County Commission Chairman Pete Meitzner’s third-floor office window overlooks the drop box placed in front of the Sedgwick County Courthouse.
In the week leading up to the election, he said he noticed a steady stream of voters casting ballots there. He said about every five to 10 seconds, someone would pull up and cast their vote.
Across the nation, “there was some distrust of the Postal System during this election,” he said. “I think there might have been a lot of people who just felt very comfortable saying ‘I’m dropping this off in this box and it’s election-only, it’s not going to get mixed up with the regular mail.’”
He said not only were the boxes locked, they were also equipped with security cameras that would have captured any attempt to tamper with them.
The boxes were paid for with a combination of state funds and money from an $816,000 grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit foundation funded from the Facebook fortune of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The county earmarked about $20,000 of the grant for the boxes and the security cameras. More than half the grant went to buy 100 new touch-screen voting machines and printers that could be placed at polling sites to instantly print ballots in case of problems.
