School Vote Cost $1.50; Fewer Precincts Possible

IT APPEARJS that each vüte! cast in the annual school election cost the taxpayers of the Ann Arbor School District about $1.50. That's expensive, and you can look at the expenditure in one of two ways. Either more voters should turn out to reduce the pervote cost or the school district should find a way to cut the total cost, estimated at $22,000. The ideal of course is to reduce both the total cost and the per-vote cost. Does Ann Arbor need 70 voting precincts for a school election? Obviously not when the total vote is about 14,600, or some 20 per cent of those registered. One precinct recorded only 23 voters, two had fewer than 40 and six fewer than 50. Over a 13-hour period, that's a range of from two to fivel votes an hour. The four precincti workers in some polling places! could almost take a nap betweenl voter visits. This was not one of the district's; better voter turnouts, of course,; but even last year when the school election attracted a lot of attention the total vote was under 19,000.. Only a few precincts recorded asj many as 500 votes in this week'sj election, and that averages about! 40 per hour. Assuming about 20' seconds to vote, and more thanj one voting machine, there shouldj have Men few if any lines oïi voters. Recognizing the fact that only a minority of citizens have enough apprecation of the democratie sys-j tem to vote regularly, the systemj makes it as easy as possible forI those who do - a polling place in I your neighborhood, plenty of elee-; tion workers to assist you and no waiting. You can't even buy an ice cream cone that easily. # CAN the Board of Education do anything about this waste of man(woman)power on election day? Possibly. The law itself isn't very helpful. It says a precinct can't have more than 1,400 registered voters if election is by -machine or or computer. If 50 per cent of the voters turn out, which isn't likely, that's an average of 54 voters per hour during the voting period. Granted that there are peaks and valleys in the voter turnout during the day, there never should be waiting lines of any length. Ann Arbor could opérate with fewer voting precincts and not inconvenience voters. No doubt about it. But the Board of Education may be hesitant about changing precincts again so soon, inas-l much as the city has been in a political hassle over ward boundaries and some voters are already protesting that they never know where to go on election day.