VOTING IN HOUSTON COUNTY WENT WELL CONSIDERING LARGE TURNOUT

You may have noticed Tuesday night, that results from races in Houston County took a bit longer than usual to come....something that county officials are addressing. Yesterday, WDHN spoke to Houston County Judge Luke Cooley, who filled us in. She said, "Business has returned to normal at the Houston County Adminstrative Building, after a long night of counting ballots for local elections...all ballots have been removed from the building and now all that`s left are voting supplies waiting to be stored." It seemed this year`s process took longer than previous years and Judge Cooley explains, "closing polls is not simple, ...the longest polls coming in were those runing two races..they had to close two different polls so all boxes, paperwork had to be done one on one so they were expecting those to be late. Also, election day went fairly smooth overall, however, Water & Electric polls had the highest turnout in history, with seven thousand registered voters, up two thousand from the last election...the crowd issue will be taken care of before the next election rolls around." She also said, "it was crowded, waits were about an hour and a half...we`ll look and see what we can do about polling places itself and where our voters vote, and we`ll do our best to make changes so it doesn`t happen again." Final numbers were not in until around 11:15PM, about 45 minutes after News 18 went off the air...the next election will be the runoff for County Commission, which Cooley says will be less complicated and expects the process to be a speedy one, but as far as the issues which slowed down this years process, she says, "we`re gonna have to take care of the growth..the town changes, and the next election is in two years, so that gives County Commssioners and Probate Office time to make changes." Judge Cooley says residents in Houston County were very nice to deal with yesterday, saying she had no problems regarding "squabling" at the polls.