By: Rick Steelhammer | Posted: Feb. 13, 2018 | Source: WV Gazette-Mail
Last month, the Kanawha County Commission voted to make early voting available to Kanawha County voters for the first time in communities other than Charleston.
On Tuesday, the commission identified the five locations in addition to the Kanawha County Voters’ Registration office in Charleston where early voting will take place during the May primary. They are:
Sissonville Branch of Kanawha County Public Library; Elk Community Center in Elkview; the Kanawha County Sheriff’s detachment office in Cross Lanes; Belle Town Hall and Marmet Town Hall.
In 2009, the Legislature approved a bill allowing counties to offer early voting at locations other than their voter registration offices.
“I’ve been working on this for 15 years,” said Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper, who pushed for the early voting legislation long before it was approved. “I’m happy that Kanawha County voters will finally be able to vote early without having to drive to Charleston to do so.”
In other developments during Tuesday’s meeting, the commission voted to drop Frontier as the county’s internet provider after a series of outages and replace it with Lumos, a move Carper said would save more than $400 per month while providing “better redundancy.”
“We need to be able to count on sending and receiving email, and the prosecutor’s staff can’t be left waiting for the system to come back up when online legal research needs to be done,” Carper said.
Last week, the commission voted to buy from the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department about 4,100 units of flu vaccine that were about to be sent back to the manufacturer, and made the immunizations available free of charge to the public under a program called Project Last Shot.
As of Tuesday, at least 125 people had received the shots.
“I’m told that those shots will help stop the spread of the flu to as many as 750 other people,” Carper said. “We’re going to keep on giving the shots until the flu season is over or we run out if vaccine.”
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169 or follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.
