The Douglas County Election Commissioners Office has quite a bit of extra work to do before the upcoming election in November.
Commissioner Brian Kruse says they need to hire more employees to verify signatures for five petitions.
Payday lending, medical marijuana, and three different gambling petitions have been delivered to state officials and Douglas County will have to count its share of the signatures.
“What that means for us is we think there will be about 50,000 signatures per petition for Douglas County so were going to have 250,000 or a quarter of a million signatures that need to be individually be verified in Douglas County alone,” Kruse tells 6 News. “So clearly that’s going to take a small army of folks to do that.”
To help count all the signatures that were gathered the election commissioner will hire full time, temporary employees and some part-time night shift help.
“It helps to have computer skills, it will go for approximately a month maybe five weeks, but that could carry over into the fall because of the big presidential general is coming up, of course, we’re going to have lots of voter registration and early voting from that,” Kruse tells 6 News.
Election commission employees will be on the clock when the petitions arrive in Douglas County.
“From the day they are delivered to our office from the Secretary of State's office we have 40 calendar days to get all those signatures verified so you see with doing 250,000 signatures, that’s why we really need those full tine folks during the day and part-time folks in the evening in this office to verify all those,”
if you’re interested you can check the election commissioners web site at votedouglascounty.com or call 402-444-8683.