Voters who have their minds made up are beginning to cast ballots for municipal and school board elections today. As early voting gets underway in Texas, Taylor County Judge Phil Crowley is alerting voters to the deadline to request a mail ballot for the current election. Judge Crowley advises voters to hand deliver their applications for a mail-ballot if they haven’t already mailed them, because applications must be in the elections office by 5 p.m. tomorrow March 25, and voters must meet specific qualifications, “Anyone who is 65 or older, anyone who has a disability, which is defined as a sickness or physical illness that prevents you from voting in person, or anyone who is going to give birth within three weeks of the election, and a couple other requirements are able to vote by mail. And that mail-in ballot application will be due, it won’t be mailed to you automatically. You have to do the application and then we’ll mail it to you once we receive that.”
Judge Crowley's reminder comes after homes around Abilene received a campaign postcard from Place 4 Abilene City Council candidate Scott Beard telling recipients they would receive a mail ballot in the coming weeks, and urging them to vote by mail.
Taylor County has nine early voting locations, which are open through Friday and again on Monday and Tuesday of next week. Taylor County’s nearly 83,954 registered voters are able to vote at their choice of polling locations. But despite a full ballot, and some amount of controversy this election season, McMurry Political Science Professor Paul Fabrizio says most voters will likely skip the ballot box this spring, “Local elections are about local things. And they’re really about the quality of our lives. You know, the streets, garbage pick up, police. Those are decided at the local level. And so our lives are more affected by what takes place here, than by what takes place in Austin or in Washington D.C. So we should vote in this election.”
Fabrizio says for a local election without statewide or federal candidates a decent turnout would be 10% to 15%, which for Taylor County would be around 12,000 votes.
