Page calls for expanded early voting in Missouri

On By Littum

ST. LOUIS COUNTY — County Administrator Sam Page is calling for additional weeks of early voting in upcoming elections after some area counties reported long lines at polling places in recent days.

At a news conference Thursday, Page called for six weeks of early voting instead of two and urged Missouri lawmakers to change state law.

“We’ve demonstrated that this is extraordinarily popular, and it’s time to expand it,” Page said at the news conference at Grant’s View Library in South County. “And I encourage the Legislature to make this change in 2025 when everyone comes back into session.”

St. Louis County voters have been waiting in long lines since early voting started last week, ahead of the Nov. 5 election, Page said Thursday. He hoped that an expansion would spread the volume over a longer period.

Most neighboring states start no-excuse early voting earlier than Missouri. Illinois starts 40 days before the election. Nebraska allows 30 days of early voting. Iowa starts 20 days earlier, as do Kansas and Tennessee, while Kentucky and Oklahoma only allow a few days.

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No-excuse early voting started in Missouri on Tuesday, October 22, two weeks before the election, and already almost 143,000 people have voted in the county.

Early Thursday afternoon, voter Maggie Bailey of unincorporated St. Louis County in a line of about 260 people at Grant’s View. The line moved quickly, she said, despite winding down a sidewalk outside the building.

Bailey’s job is flexible and she had some free time to vote, so she didn’t mind the wait. But she worries about people who can’t make it during working hours on weekdays and who work on weekends. She favors starting early voting earlier, but said she’d also like to see polling places stay open later for early voters.

“If you have a shift at McDonald’s and can’t go, what are you going to do?” Bailey said. “There are some people who don’t have the opportunity to come.”

Bailey ended up waiting about an hour and a half, she said later. That’s better than the last presidential election, when she waited about two and a half hours to vote on election day.

Republican County Councilman Mark Harder said he believes the county needs larger polling places where people can vote early, not weeks of early voting. Instead of libraries and public buildings, the polls should be in gymnasiums or other large spaces.

“After this election, the Board of Elections will probably have to sit down and look at a heat map of who is voting early and find places that are larger and centered around those heat maps,” Harder said.

Absentee voting without an excuse is available from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. through November 1; from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on November 2; and from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on November 4 at several locations in St. Louis County.

On election day, voters in St. Louis County cast their vote from 06.00 to 19.00 at any of the 230 polling stations in the county.

You can check where to vote, find out how long queues are in St. Louis and St. Louis County, and learn about local elections at the Post-Dispatch’s voter guide at stltoday.com/elections.


St. Louis region's early voters face traffic jams, long waits to 'get this done'

Voters today have some options in terms of how they vote and when they vote. The main choices are in-person voting in a polling place on election day, early in-person voting before election day, or postal voting. There has been some form of absentee voting available to voters since the founding of the Republic, and early voting and postal voting have existed in one form or another for more than 100 years.