When it comes to voting early for the general election now just two weeks away on Nov. 5, fewer residents seem to want to cast their ballot through the mail, Aurora area officials said.
Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham said that overall, early voting is down in Kane County, saying he believes “voters want to return to the polls in person again now that they can.”
“The pandemic got more people out” to vote early, Cunningham said Monday. “It’s not as much as it was four years ago and I think the pandemic got more people involved.”
Totals as of Monday, Cunningham said, include 30,901 who had voted early, with 9,690 “going to early voting sites” and 20,900 with mail-in ballots.
“At this point, I don’t have another explanation for what is going on,” he said Monday concerning early voting. “We just opened up the rest of the early voting sites (in Kane County) today, there’s 20-some more of them.”
He said the 9,690 who voted early in-person before Monday cast ballots at the clerk’s offices in Aurora and Geneva.
“There’s a greater turnout in the Geneva site so far than in Aurora,” he said.
Overall, he said “there is less activity” involving people voting early.
Cunningham said the current political climate may be a factor in the low voting number so far.
“People are fed up with the bickering and the fighting at the national level that has trickled down to the local level. I think that’s a valid evaluation because people have been worn down with politics over the last few years,” he said. “It’s a totally different business. It’s more brutal now than it’s ever been.”
In DuPage County, Chief Deputy County Clerk Adam Johnson on Monday said things are slightly different in DuPage due to a change in the number of early voting locations.
“Our situation is a little different. In 2020, we had only one early voting location in the last few weeks at the county fairgrounds and we also had our old voting equipment, which took much longer to process voters,” he said. “Since then, we have upgraded to a system that lets us move voters through faster and we also have five sites open instead of one. We’ve actually had higher in-person voting turnout over the last couple of weeks and no wait because we are processing more efficiently across more sites.”
Johnson said at this point “vote-by-mail totals are down from 2020.”
Early vote totals as of Monday morning in DuPage County include 74,591 voters who have cast ballots early as compared to 92,366 during the same time period back in 2020.
“We are down overall for now and that is because the amount we are down in vote-by-mail exceeds the amount we are up in the in-person early voting,” Johnson said. “It seems pretty clear that there were people in 2020 who voted by mail for health concerns during the pandemic who would now like to return to the in-person voting.”
Kendall County Clerk Debbie Gillette said in-person voting “has been steady with our early voters, and with our vote by mail I’ve not seen as many go out.”
“Back in 2020, a lot of people were choosing to do the vote by mail but we don’t have as many going out as we did in 2020,” she said. “Voters have to request a vote by mail and they are down from 2020 but are still considerable. I’m probably at 10,000 right now which is still quite a bit.”
Gillette said as of Monday there have been 3,900 early voters in the county.
Overall, Gillette said the county is “even with where we’ve been in the past.”
“Our system is the same as it was and people come in spurts it seems like,” she said of early voters. “You can get 10 people and then nobody but the process is as smooth as it ever was. My sense of voters is that people are going to get out and vote. They want their votes to count and know that this is an important election. That’s the sense I get.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
