OXFORD – Town Clerk Ellen Morrison said Monday that her office is “overwhelmed” with a record number of absentee ballots this year.

A total of 402 had been handed out or mailed by Monday, and almost 300 have been returned.

“For me, it’s a record,” said Morrison, who has been a clerk for 11 years. “I’ve had large turnouts with other presidential elections,” she said, but the most absentees cast in any of those was about 150.

“I expect we’ll be about three times that when this one is over,” she said.

The town has 3,298 voters registered as of Monday, she advised.

Clerks in other Oxford County towns were seeing similar interest. In nearby Norway, 525 absentee ballots had been requested as of Monday. In 2004 a total of 571 absentee ballots were cast, Town Clerk Shirley Boyce said.

As of Friday, Rumford had 730 requests, surpassing the absentee total for the last presidential election, said Beth Bellegarde, the voter registrar.

“It’s higher. Four years ago we had 700 or 800, but we’re at that now and have a week left,” Bellegarde said.

Morrison said being able to vote outside the polls before Election Day is convenient for people, but the process of distributing, collecting, securing and counting those ballots means additional work at an already very busy time at the town hall on Pleasant Street.

“The process itself really hasn’t taken into consideration the work in the clerk’s office and the process involved,” she said. Boyce agreed that voter convenience seemed to be driving the uptick in ballot requests.

Absentee voters need office personnel to help them fill out the application for a ballot, then the voter must sign the application, get instructions for filling out the ballot, and return it to the office with their signature attached to the envelope. Then the ballot needs to be stored in a secure area accessible only by the clerk.

“It puts a large additional workload on us with no additional help,” Morrison said.

“It’s also tax time,” she added, so office personnel are busy taking payments on the first half of the fiscal year property taxes, along with the other day-to-day duties.

Morrison said some towns are permitted by the state to count absentee ballots on Monday, Nov. 3, because they have a secure municipal building where the absentee ballots can be locked up, counted by the clerk and kept right there through Election Day.

However, “I wouldn’t be able to meet the requirements,” she said, because the town’s municipal building where her office is located is separate from the Election Day polling station at the Oxford Public Safety Building on Route 26.

“It needs to be in a locked environment” that only she can get into, she explained, and the Public Safety Building does not meet that requirement.

“There is no place for me to put everything, and records, and store it and have it for the next day because I’m in two different buildings,” she explained.

Therefore, on Election Day she’ll take the absentee ballots to the polling station and count a certain number every hour and return all the ballots to the town hall at the end of the day and lock them up. And she’ll have extra hands for the process.

“I’m getting in more people than I do at other elections to help,” she said. “I feel comfortable about the election and the crew I have. Everybody who wants to vote will be able to vote.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.