A few days into advance voting ahead of the Nov. 5 general election, the county’s in-person early voting numbers are “trending higher than any election right now,” according to Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew.
Early voting began Wednesday, Oct. 16. As of the end of Friday, the county had nearly 3,000 in-person advance voters and had mailed nearly 13,200 ballots, Shew said Monday morning (2,954 and 13,191, respectively, to be exact).
Shew said 2020 numbers are hard to compare to the present because those numbers reflect a larger than normal number of mail ballots because of COVID-19 concerns.
“We do comparisons with 2016, 2012 and 2008, with concentration on 2016 because it reflects most recent non-COVID Presidential race,” he said. “We are running much higher in both mail and in-person voting.”
Ultimately, total voter turnout was about 65% in 2008; 62% in 2012; 63% in 2016; and 73% in 2020, according to election records on the county’s website.
For the Aug. 6 primary election, more than 200 ballots mailed from Douglas County voters were not counted because they arrived after the cutoff date. That was because of issues with the Kansas City post office. (Read a full article about that at this link.)
New protocols in place should help avoid a repeat of that situation.
“We have been watching the scans from our tracking system and the mail ballots are moving quickly,” Shew said. “After August, we have set up a system which gives us the ability to find ballots which are getting multiple scans in KC, when identified we notify the post office.”
Read all about how to cast your ballot in Douglas County in this article. Voters can still request an advance ballot to be mailed to you through Tuesday, Oct. 29. Request a ballot quickly at KSVotes.org.
Wichita State University’s IKE Lab has an online dashboard tracking advance voting stats for each county in Kansas. The stats for Douglas County, which Shew confirmed are accurate, can be found at this link.
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Mackenzie Clark (she/her), reporter/founder of The Lawrence Times, can be reached at mclark@lawrencekstimes.com. Read more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
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