PARKERSBURG – Wood County officials are going to be looking at different ways of conducting elections in the future, including the possibility of consolidating voting locations while a missing thumb drive from the election has been located.

Wood County Clerk Joe Gonzales appeared before Wood County Commissioners Jimmy Colombo and Jim Hamric on Thursday to discuss some of the challenges his office, as well as other county clerks around the state, have been having in holding elections. Commission President Blair Couch was absent from Thursday’s meeting.

Gonzales talked about some of the challenges his office is facing with retaining poll workers and a want to be able to consolidate some voting locations around the area so they won’t need as many poll workers.

The county needed 307 poll workers to man the current voting locations they have. They have regularly had people who called in to tell them they can’t make it for various reasons. They have had alternates they were able to place and had county employees who filled some of the other vacancies.

Another idea would be to have all available county employees available to work Election Day with the exception of law-enforcement and dispatchers, similar to what is done in Kawawha County.

“They are really qualified and it would really be a really benefit to our election process,” Gonzales said. “We are fortunate to have the poll workers we do.”

However, many are getting older and the county is in need of getting some new people in to build up that experience again, Gonzales said.

They had a few college students who volunteered Election Day out and Gonzales said they did great because they were more tech savy.

“They were on it,” he said adding the older poll workers liked having those younger people there to help with those aspects.

Having county employees do Election Day work would also allow the clerk’s office to hold additional training sessions. He wants the poll workers to have more hands-on training experience with the equipment.

Gonzales said he would like to move poll worker training closer to the election so it will be fresher in people’s minds.

Currently, they have two-hour training sessions for volunteers, but Gonzales said he would really like to devote more time to training, if he could.

Officials were awaiting the vote totals from one final precinct Tuesday night when it was discovered a thumb drive had been misplaced.

Gonzales said the precinct had all of their paper ballots and a backup thumb drive as well as other identifying materials when people handed in their printed ballots. Officials were able to account for all of the votes and check everything against the paper ballots that were printed out when people voted.

“Everything matched up and we knew we were correct,” he said. “It was stressful, but we were able to get through it.”

Thursday afternoon the missing thumb drive was located by county employees in one of the bags brought in on election night, Gonzales said. He is planning to run the drive through the tabulation system on Monday as part of the canvassing process.

Gonzales said he wanted to do it during canvassing to allow county officials and the public to be able to see it and review it publically.

In the past, Couch has suggested the idea of consolidating voting locations where various voting precincts can gather at one location to form “Super Precincts” where people can vote. The idea is the county would not need as many poll workers to man these locations.

Gonzales said the new school being build where Van Devender Middle School use to be could be such a location or West Virginia University at Parkersburg and others.

There are a number of small precincts that are in the same general area, about half a mile from each other.

County officials said having fewer poll workers overall might allow the county to be able to pay poll workers more as that rate is set by the county commission. For a training session, poll workers are paid $25 and then receive $175 to work on Election Day.

Gonzales said he is working on a plan that could be implemented for the General Election in November that he would present to the county commission for approval.

He said he has been in contact with the Secretary of State’s Office and apprising them of plans.

“We have discussed it with them and they understand because it is happening all around the state,” Gonzales said. “It is getting harder for everybody to get poll workers.

“Almost everyone in my office was sent out into the field to work at different precincts, because we didn’t have enough people.”

He still had to have people answering phones to direct people who called in on where they needed to go to be able to go vote.

“It is a lot of work,” Gonzales said. There is so much work that goes into elections.

“There is just so much prep work that goes into elections.”

The Wood County Commission will convene 9 a.m. Monday as the canvassing board to review around 86 provisional ballots as well as oversee a group of poll workers as they conduct a hand count of three randomly picked voting precincts before finalizing the election results.

Contact Brett Dunlap at bdunlap@newsandsentinel.com