Erie County Elections officials are busy preparing for Tuesday's Primary. Even with a switch to a new mail-in ballot vendor, they said they're about as ready as they can be.

Erie County Director of Elections, Tonia Fernandez is a woman on the move, as we count down to Tuesday's May Primary. She's in charge of making sure things go smoothly at all of Erie County's 149-polling stations, that requires about 900-poll workers, something Fernandez said has been a struggle in recent years.
 

"In 2020, we had a lot of poll workers step away, just because of the pandemic. But, since then we've had a lot of poll workers continue to come back. So we have a stable unit of poll workers this time around. We always have some last-minute call ups, but we've been able to plug people in and we're ready to go", said Fernandez.


Fernandez said the switch to a new mail-in ballot provider's gone smoothly, and they've added equipment to improve the overall vote counting process, "So we're now able to separate the ballots by county council district and that will mean we have less ballots to count in the event of a recount. Mainly, like if we have a supervisor's race and we want to recount, we'll have less ballots to rescan."


While she knows voter turnout can be light in a Primary, Fernandez said she's hoping races like Erie Mayor bring voters out in bigger numbers. According to Fernandez, "I think we're probably going to have slightly less of a voter turnout than the presidential election, we do see some excitement in the community, so we just have to see how it turns out."