Voters still in line after polls closed at the Fargo Civic Center (provided photo)
FARGO (KFGO) – Election Day in Cass County was marred by long lines and wait times exceeding an hour at a number of voting centers throughout the day.
“It’s not ideal. We can and should do better, and we’re planning to do better,” Murray Nash, the new Cass County Elections Administrator said.
Nash said the implementation of voting centers in Cass County is a work in progress.
“We went to vote centers in 2020 which, as you may recall was the covid election, so that was a bit of an outlier in developing the data that we use to inform voting habits and preferences across the county and we certainly – starting relatively early in the day yesterday – started to identify areas that we could and should and will improve on in the 2024 cycle,” Nash said.
Nash said the end of the day was particularly busy. 7600 people went to the polls in the final two hours of voting, between 5-7 p.m. which represents about 15% of the total number of people who voted in Cass County, including early and absentee voters.
“Our initial thinking is we need more vote centers and we need to look at how they are distributed across the county to make sure they are placed to facilitate the population of the county in the best way, and we need more staff for those vote centers and we think we should be recruiting and training that staff earlier than what we have in the past, and have a larger reserve pool of vote staff,” he said.
Nash says once they’ve put together an outline and budget to achieve those needs, they’ll go to the County Commission to get the necessary resources.
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