May 2 elections to remain unchanged

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2 Uniform Elections within Young County will proceed as scheduled after contact was made by the Young County Elections Office to each entity contracted.

Young County Elections Administrator, Lauren Sullivan, said she made contact with representatives from Graham ISD, Olney ISD, Newcastle ISD, city of Graham and city of Olney, in order to offer them the chance to postpone their election dates. All entities made the choice to keep all voting and election related dates as they are, according to Sullivan.

“Nothing has changed in Young County for the May 2 elections as far as dates, or times, or anything else,” she said. “All of the boards were given the opportunity to move to Nov. 3, and they all elected to maintain their May 2 (date) simply because we had already started that process. We had already ordered ballots, we already had machines programmed and so it made more sense financially and not knowing what the future holds, to go ahead with the plan that we already had in place.”

Sullivan said what has been moved by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is the primary runoff election which was scheduled for Tuesday, May 26 and will now be moved into July. She said she is still waiting on the updated dates from the state, but said locally things also remained the same because members on those boards are needed during this pandemic.

“We can only push it to November, but we have still got to have school boards and we have still got to have city councils and mayors and those sorts of things so we can get through the current events. And all of those people are going off their boards at the middle of May,” she said. “I think that was another factor in everybody wanting to go ahead and keep up their date was that we’ve got people who are leaving simply because their term is up.”

For the full story, see the Saturday, March 28 edition of The Graham Leader.