OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – Voters in Douglas County who are planning to vote early in the 2022 election should be on the lookout for early voting ballot applications.
The election commissioner’s office begins mailing out early voting ballot applications for the 2022 General Election Wednesday.
Douglas County will mail out around 170,000 of the white early voting ballot applications and the white cards will feature only a hint of green.
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“We started working with our vendor this spring and because of supply chain issues something we’re all living with these days. They were just unable to get the colored card stock,” said Brian Kruse.
Douglas County Election Commissioner Brian Kruse says there will be a bit of the old green color on the white ballot application that will hopefully catch the eyes of voters.
“So the cards will be on white card stock but there is a rectangular box on the outside of each side that has the same color green as the previous. All the information is the same we haven’t made any changes voters don’t need to do anything different from the past, it’s just because of the supply chain issue we couldn’t get the green card stock,” said Kruse.
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Printing companies in the metro say right now it’s really hard to even find sheets of paper or envelopes.
“I tried to source some colored envelopes a couple of weeks ago for a mailing that someone wanted to do even though white envelopes are hard to get too, the green envelopes I was told it would be a five-month lead time to get what I needed, for August mailing so that went by the wayside. So I certainly understand the problem that the election commissioner is experiencing,” said Julie Burgess.
Julie Burgess is with Automatic Printing Co. her family-owned business has been located near 17th and Cuming since 1935. Julie says this paper shortage also has caught the attention of candidates running in the 2022 elections who want to reach voters directly by mail.
“So we’re telling them line up your strategy now if you know that you need to do mailing that’s going to hit the first of October and one that’s going to hit right before the election we need to get paper now because paper is hard to get,” said Burgess.
And if it’s hard to get, that means it will cost more.
“And just like everything else there is no static nature to the price of paper‚ it’s all just shooting up and sometimes every five days it will go up another 10%, 15% it’s just really crazy,” Burgess said.
The election commissioner wants to alert voters of the card color change as early as possible so they can be on the lookout for the white cards.
“I believe that transparency equals trust and trust equals honest and fair elections, which we have in Douglas County. So again, we just want to reiterate we’re not doing this for any reason other than we couldn’t get colored card stock,” said Kruse.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
The early voting applications will be mailed Wednesday. Registered voters should see them in their mailboxes early next week.
The deadline to submit a request for an early voting ballot to be mailed for the general election is at 6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28.
If you have any questions about voting call the Election Commissioner’s Office at 402-444-8683.
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