preview

What Will Voter Turnout Be This Year? Essay

Better Essays

WOOSTER — So, what will voter turnout be this year and who will show up to the polls? Those questions have election officials and political pundits scratching their heads as they try to predict who will head to the polls and who will win the presidential election Tuesday.
Lisa Welch, director of the Holmes County Board of Elections, offered a big and bold prediction: 70 percent, or 12,560 of the county’s 17,944 voters, will cast votes.
“I just have a feeling,” Welch said, citing anecdotal evidence to support her hunch. A husband and wife, both in their 70s, registered for the first time this year and voted early. An 80-year-old man who never registered to vote did so this year, and his wife, who hasn’t voted since she cast a ballot for John F. Kennedy, voted.
“Something is bringing them out, and I am not sure what it is,” Welch said.
Julie Leathers, director of the Wayne County Board of Elections, is predicting a 55 percent turnout on election day. About 20 percent of the county’s 74,797 registered voters have already cast ballots, either through mail-in or in-person absentee voting.
“I think there is so much interest in this election,” Leathers said. “We have so many new registrations. People are interested.”
Leathers said this election cycle is such a “volatile environment, and everyone is so opinionated that I think it is going to be a large turnout.”
From everything Jim Bird, vice chairman of the Wayne County Democratic Party, is reading, voter turnout is expected to be

Get Access