Vote center plan for Monroe County to get public hearing, no longer appears dead

There is still a chance that Monroe County could adopt vote centers as a way for voters to cast ballots, and that the centers would be in place for the 2026 election cycle, which is less than a year away.

That’s because on Thursday, Monroe County’s three-member election board voted to hold a public hearing on the recommendations that have been put forward by a vote center study committee. The recommendations include converting all 29 existing precinct-based polling locations to vote centers.

Presenting the recommendations to the election board on Thursday was the vote center study committee chair, Ilana Stonebraker.

Vote centers are different from the kind of precinct-based polling locations currently used by Monroe County. At a precinct-based polling site, only voters from specified precincts can cast a ballot there.

Vote centers are polling places where a voter who is registered in any precinct can cast a ballot. For election administrators, it means some additional planning—to make sure that all the different ballots, which are tied to different precincts, are available for voters across the county.

There's a statutory process for converting from precinct-based locations to vote centers. Monroe County is now in the middle of that process. As of early 2025, 65 of Indiana’s 92 counties have adopted vote centers.

The date of the public hearing on the vote center proposal is not yet set—that will come after county attorney Molly Turner-King sorts through the public noticing requirements for the hearing.

The vote by election board members to hold a public hearing was unanimous—which included the support of Danny Shields, who last week was appointed to the seat by the newly elected chair of the Monroe County Republican Party, Cory Grass.

The appointment of Shields as the Republican Party’s designee means that vote centers now have at least a chance for enactment in the county, when they appeared to be certain to fail.

That’s because at last month’s election board meeting on Feb. 6, the previous GOP appointee to the board, John Arnold, said he would vote against them. Enactment of vote centers requires a unanimous vote by the three-member election board.

A big concern for Arnold was additional cost, especially given the current momentum in state government towards reducing property tax revenue to local units.

Vote centers in Indiana are generally promoted as a way to increase voter convenience, reduce the number of situations where voters discover they’ve appeared at the wrong polling place; and to reduce costs by requiring fewer polling places.

But vote centers as proposed by the study committee will mean some extra cost, mostly at the start, to add additional equipment. That’s due in part to the fact that the committee’s initial proposal is to convert all 29 existing polling locations to vote centers. There would not be any cost savings due to a reduction in the number of polling locations.

Extra printers are needed for vote centers, compared to precinct-based polling locations, because the ballots at vote centers get printed on-demand as voters check in to vote. That’s different from the pre-printed ballots that are used with precinct-based polling locations.

Only after some elections have been run with vote centers, and data is collected on where voters actually choose to cast a ballot, would the number of vote centers be reduced.

Factoring in the roughly $600,000 upfront costs, Monroe County’s vote center study committee estimates the increased cost in future years to be about 5 percent more for vote centers compared to precinct-based polling locations.

In the recommendations that were adopted by the vote center study committee at its most recent meeting, on Feb. 19, the estimated startup cost for converting all 29 of Monroe County’s current polling sites to vote centers is $601,763.

Of that amount, $35,873 has been covered with a Help America Vote Act (HAVA) grant from the Indiana Secretary of State's office. The HAVA grant is supposed to go towards printers.

Here’s a breakdown of the additional equipment needed for vote centers and its cost:

● Ballot Printers/Print Devices Hart: 75 @ $5,875 for a total of $440,625
● Auto-Ballot Kit Hart: 87 @ $499 for a total of $43,413
● Label Printers NoInk: 125 @ $525 for a total of $65,625
● Scanners Hart: 10 @ $5,210 for a total of $52,100

John Arnold’s service on the board was brief. He had been appointed by then-chair of the Monroe County Republican Party, William Ellis, to replace Judith Benckart, who had expressed basic support of vote centers before she resigned, depending on their configuration.

The vote center committee met in December 2024, with an eye towards completing its recommendations and submitting them to the election board ahead of Benckart’s departure.

The plan had been for the committee to meet again to finalize the recommendations, and then for the election board to meet, after Christmas, but before the start of 2025, when Arnold’s term was set to start. That plan foundered on the fact that Ellis’s appointment of Arnold would have already been effective because it read “next meeting, or as of January 1st 2025.”

After Thursday’s election board meeting, Shields confirmed to The B Square that he had not, like Arnold, already decided to vote no. But Shields also said he has also not decided to vote yes, because no date for the board’s vote has been set. In fact, no date for the initial public hearing has been set.

The process that is described by the Secretary of State’s website, based on state election law, includes at least a 30-day period for public comment, after the initial public hearing, to consider the draft plan.

After the 30-day minimum public comment period, state election law then requires a second public hearing to be held, when all the written comments from the public and the draft plan are considered. It’s at that point when the election board could take a vote.

According to election supervisor Kylie Farris, the initial public hearing is likely to be scheduled sometime in the next few weeks. That means a decision about vote centers by the election board could be conceivable in May.

The topic of vote centers is not unfamiliar to Shields, even though Thursday was his first election board meeting. Soon after the vote center committee was established, then-chair of the county GOP Taylor Bryant, appointed Shields to the vote center study committee, on which he served for several months.

The 11-member vote center committee was established by the election board about a year and a half ago, in late summer 2023.

On Thursday, at his first election board meeting, by way of introduction to his colleagues, Shields revealed his connection to election supervisor Kylie Farris. “If Kylie makes a mistake somewhere, you can forgive her because of her sixth grade teacher!” Shields said.

That was his way of saying Farris had been a student of his at Unionville Elementary, where he was a teacher. Shields retired from Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC) in 2017.