Letters to the Editor

Timing error

To The Editor:

This is in response to last week’s article titled “Number 6 mistakenly listed as polling place.”

State election law requires that the Board of Elections send what we refer to as a “mailcheck” card to every voter in the county “... not less than sixty-five days nor more that seventy days before the day of the general election in each year ...” For the 2009 general election, this time frame was the end of August.

Unfortunately, while our mailing house was processing the mailcheck cards, we didn’t have a replacement location for the voters whose polling place was the Number 6 School. It wasn’t possible to segregate the voters from the Number 6 School out of the more than 902,000 cards mailed, particularly since the other side of the card has vital general election voter information and deadlines.

However, it is the board’s practice to send voters polling place change cards separately from the mailcheck cards to ensure that voters are informed of the new location once we have a contract in place. Also, on Election Day we post signs on the doors of the old location with the address of the new polling place.

We want your readers to know that the mailcheck cards sent to them were not an error on the part of the board, but an overlap in time between meeting our legal obligation to send out the cards and securing the new polling location — Lawrence High School — for those voters formerly voting at the Number 6 School.

John A. DeGrace and William T. Biamonte, Commissioners of elections