Trying to explain the extraordinary delays experienced by grace period voters, The News-Gazette reported that Champaign County Clerk Gordy Hulten said: “We mail everything out the same day … I personally have run mail to the post office.” This is false. David Collier, who recently moved to town to work with me as the Stat 100 course technology specialist, was mailed his ballot application postmarked four days after the morning he filed for it. With the two day post office delivery time, he had exactly one day to get it returned. If he had followed the instructions Hulten gave him and mailed it back, his chance to vote would already be lost.

When David brought the application in by hand, he was still not allowed to vote even though all of Hulten’s security checks were long-since finished. Instead, he was told a ballot would be mailed. Unless that promise is kept much more quickly than last time, he still won’t get to vote.

From what I saw while waiting in line to vote, this all looks like standard practice to disenfranchise hundreds, perhaps thousands, of voters.

Hulten has just now, under pressure, switched to sending out ballots with the applications. Unless he speeds up the process, neither will arrive in time to be of use.

Hulten says that he runs grace period this way because he “treats every voter who registers in Champaign County the same.” If that were true, we’d all be in trouble. We need a county clerk who tells the truth.

Ellen Fireman, professor in statistics