Natasha Vaughn-Holdridge is reporting for Columbia-Greene Media that early voting is coming to Kinderhook, according to Columbia County's expansion plan. The county Board of Elections received an Early Voting Expansion grant of nearly $19,000 to add early voting sites within the county. The grant funding support the addition of a polling site in the county's largest voting area, which is Kinderhook. “We’re now having to have an early voting site in our largest municipality,” county Republican Elections Commissioner Kelly Miller-Simmons said. “So that will mean we will have two early voting sites, and this grant will help us [to] cover the cost..." Early voting allows voters to cast their ballots during the nine-day early voting period from October 23 to 31 this year. “The schedules [are] arranged so there’s weekend voting, there’s weekday voting, there’s some evening voting,” Columbia County Democratic Elections Commissioner Ken Dow said. “Trying to make it available to people with different schedules, that’s why the hours vary from day to day." New York began allowing early voting in 2019. In 2019, Columbia County had 3,371 early voters; in 2020 that number increased to 6,000 people, Dow said. Until now, the only place to vote early in the county was at the Columbia County Office Building on State Street in Hudson. The Kinderhook early voting site will be at the Martin H. Glynn Municipal Building in Valatie. Any registered voter in Columbia County can vote early at either location. Read the full story at HudsonValley360 [dot] com.