It’s a matter of too little and much too late for some Jefferson County voters who received postcards informing them of the April 2 municipal election days after voting closed.
County Clerk Jeannie Goff said much to her chagrin, a few residents recently called her office wondering why they were receiving postcards featuring a localized sample ballot and place of their local voting location after the election was over.
“(The postcards) were all mailed on March 12 or 13,” Goff said. “I don’t have a good answer on why people are still getting them in the mail. It’s all up to the (U.S. Postal Service).”
She said her office mailed out 143,655 of the cards.
“They’re pre-sorted, and we drop them in St. Louis, rather than taking them to a post office here. only to have them sent up to St. Louis, sorted and then sent back down here to the local post offices,” Goff said. “The idea of that is to save delivery time.”
Goff said she heard from a woman whose election mailer arrived late even though it was in the same batch with one delivered in time to Goff’s De Soto home.
“She got hers on Election Day,” Goff said. “I don’t have any explanation for that.”
Goff said it’s frustrating because she and her office want to make sure voters have information at hand so they can research candidates and issues before heading to the polls.
“We get some people who call frustrated that we’re not telling them an election is coming up,” she said. “While we’re not legally obligated to send out the postcards, we want to do what we can to educate voters.”
She said this year’s mailing cost $15,000 to $20,000 for printing and postage costs.
“We’re going to have staff meetings to try to come up with ways to address this,” she said. “We’ll talk to the people at the St. Louis Post Office and some of our locals to see what’s going on.
“We may have to send them out earlier in August and see what happens,” she said. “But I wish I had some answers.”