Workers in the Madison County Clerk’s Office are busy counting and verifying signatures of those seeking to make alcohol sales legal across the entire county. If enough valid signatures are found, the wet-dry referendum would appear on the May Primary ballot. Madison County Clerk Kenny Barger said a final number could be known in the next day or so.
“But it’s the largest petition we’ve ever gotten by far. The last one had 33 hundred signatures needed for the tax petition a few years ago. So, it’s a process. We can get through about..each person can do about 300 a day. And we’ve got three to four people working on it, so a little time-consuming,” said Barger.
Barger said about 12 thousand signatures were presented to his office. Around 75 hundred are needed to put the wet-dry question before all Madison County voters. Barger noted it’s not a sure thing that there are enough valid signatures.
“This one was done mostly electronically and there are lots of duplicates. Folks don’t understand the process and they think they sign up more than once, it’s going to count whereas it’s just one signature per voter, one sign-in per voter. So, we’ve got a lot of duplicates in that,” said Barger.
Currently, Richmond is wet and part of southern Madison County only allows alcohol by the drink with a meal.
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