Early voting is off to a record breaking start in Tazewell County, while Peoria County is seeing a drop-off from numbers during a pandemic-era election.
Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman says his office saw 269 people on Thursday for the first day of early voting. The office also sent out an estimated 10,000 vote-by-mail ballots. Ackerman says these are both record breaking numbers.
“But from what I’m hearing throughout the state, I’m hearing from fellow county clerks that they all, we all saw record numbers yesterday,” he said.
Ackerman says early voters appeared to be a mix of ages and voting experience. His impression was that most of them just “knew who they wanted to vote for and wanted to get it over with.”
Some early voters asked for tours and further explanation of how the voting process works at a county level.
“This is the way we get rid of the misinformation that’s flooded the market about how elections are conducted,” said Ackerman. “By being transparent and showing you how they are actually conducted here in the state of Illinois.”
In Peoria County, election commission executive director Elizabeth Gannon says the first day of early voting saw a significant drop off from the 2020 election. 356 voters showed up Thursday to cast an early vote.
“[2020] is kind of an anomaly because of the pandemic and everybody was being told, you know, told to vote early or vote by mail just to get that vote in, just in case something is going to happen,” said Gannon. “So, on the first day of early voting in 2020, we saw 684, almost double.”
Gannon thinks some other factors also play a role in the decline this year. For example, Illinois instituted “permanent vote-by-mail,” where voters can register to automatically receive mail-in ballots moving forward. That program actually caused some other brief issues at Peoria County’s first day of early voting with residents who had applied for the permanent change.
“Their ballot had just been mailed, and then they were coming in and attempting to vote in person,” said Gannon. “So there was some confusion there, but we worked through it.”
In that situation, Gannon says voters can still cast a “provisional ballot” at the election commission office. The provisional ballot is stored separately and only tabulated once it’s clear the mail-in ballot isn’t coming. Gannon says this is a safeguard to prevent people from voting twice.
At the moment, early voting is only available in person at the Tazewell County Clerk’s Office in Pekin or at the Peoria County Election Commission’s Office in Peoria. In late October, Tazewell will expand to early voting locations in Washington, Morton, Tremont and East Peoria. Peoria County opens up satellite sites on Monday, Oct. 21.
You can find more information on voting in Tazewell here and in Peoria here.
The General Election is Nov. 5, 2024.
