Will County Clerk redesigns voter registration cards

In a recent move by Will County Clerk Lauren Staley Ferry, voter registration cards are redesigned to save money for taxpayers.

"Honestly, we have just been looking for ways to make things more efficient in our office since I started," Ferry said. "When we took a look at the voter registration cards, we simply noticed they were two per page and talked it through so we could streamline the information a little bit more."

The new cards, which have already been in the process of being mailed out, are much smaller in size, which Ferry said will decrease the price for postage costs for citizens in Will County.

Now, the postage costs have dropped to 28 cents per unit, compared to 45.9 cents per unit.

In just the first batch of the cards being sent out, more than $900 will be saved for the 5,100 cards that are disseminated.

"It will be a savings of about $161,000 in postage costs for all of the batches together which is pretty incredible," Ferry said.

Every two years, the Clerks office is ordered by the state to do a mass mailing of Voter Registration Cards, which Ferry said will be the biggest indication of how much money is saved.

The mass mailing consists of 450,000 cards in 2020, and another 450,000 in 2022.

Not only will the cards allow for taxpayers to be more frugal, but the new cards also will cut printing costs in half because they are now being digitally printed at four cards per page.

Another plus for the new cards are they will be more environmentally friendly, which Ferry said is one of the most important new aspects of the cards.

The new cards will reduce waste by increasing the number printed per sheet and reducing the size of the printed area that voters must cut away to make them fit into a normal wallet.

Currently, the cards are already being mailed out according to Ferry and she said that citizens who recently registered to vote will begin receiving the redesigned cards shortly.

Following that, the County Clerk's Office will then send cards to newly registered voters in batches nearing 1,500 in the future months, and the next mass mailing of Voter Registration Cards is scheduled for the summer of 2020.

"People should start receiving the new cards very soon," Ferry said. "We have already mailed a fresh batch of 5,000 voter cards so it honestly just depends.

"I'm super excited about this because anytime we can save the taxpayers dollars it's huge, it's not always very easy to find ways to do that."