Post updated at 10:33 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 5:
Douglas County voters who cast their ballots early in person shattered the previous record by more than 5,300 votes, and the top election official expects this to be the second highest turnout the county has seen.
The previous record for in-person early ballots cast was 15,637 in the 2016 general election, Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said last week.
Douglas County voters had already broken the record ahead of Saturday early voting. Stats available Tuesday morning gave the final total of early in-person votes cast — 20,946, or roughly a quarter of the county’s 83,165 registered voters.
Here’s a chart of the in-person early ballots cast broken down by party:
More than 11,600 advance ballots had also been returned to the election office by Tuesday morning, with early votes altogether representing about 39% of the county’s voters.
Shew said he would’ve expected early results to take longer Tuesday night, but the office overstaffed in preparation for the large voter turnout. At around 9:20 p.m. Tuesday, staff had counted approximately 54,000 ballots.
Shew predicts the overall turnout will be around 56,000 to 57,000, or around 68%, which would be the county’s second-largest participation in an election.
First-time voters had much to do with that, he said, and they weren’t just youth. Shew said there were folks in their 80s and 90s who were voting for the first time.
“We heard from so many board workers that said it was the most first-time voters that’ve come to their polling place,” Shew said. “And we saw that here. That’s so great. … Every time it’s a first-time voter, everybody cheers, which is so embarrassing to an 18-year-old. And on some days it was just cheer after cheer.”
Here are turnout numbers for each polling place through 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, as posted by the Douglas County clerk’s office. Altogether, 41,322 voters had cast their ballots, for 49.69% of voters.
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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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