A key deadline is Tuesday — the last day to request absentee mail ballots.
Whether by mail or in person, more people are turning out to vote early as the general election approaches next Tuesday. It may be setting a new pace.
"Seventeen thousand people vote early. If you look back at the primary election there was only about 9,000, so it’s roughly almost double," said Scott Nago of the State Office of Elections. "General turnout is normally higher, but I haven’t seen any where it’s doubled."
That’s the state count just through the weekend, since early walk-in voting started last week. The majority of those so far have been on Oahu.
"As far as the walk-in voting goes, through Saturday we had over 10,000 persons walk in and vote over our three sites on Oahu," said elections administrator Glen Takahashi. "In the primary election, we did just under 13,000 for the primary election, with the walk-in voting. So we’ll probably get close to 20,000 if the pace continues like this."
Tens of thousands more have already voted early by mail.
"We’ve mailed out over 125,000 absentee mail ballots and as of the weekend, 62,000 have already been returned," said Takahashi. "The last general election, if I remember, we mailed 104,000 pieces in total."
The final count of how many could vote by mail will still go up because there’s still a little time to request a mail ballot.
"If a voter wants an absentee mail ballot, we need to receive the request by close of business tomorrow, Tuesday, that will enable us to process the request and get the mail ballot out to them, and they would have to return their voted ballot by mail so we receive it no later than 6 p.m. on Election Day," said Takahashi.
As for Election Day, next Tuesday, Nov. 6, the state says they’re ready for the polls with all volunteers in place and trained up. It had been down to the wire at the primary.
"Primaries and generals are a little different. In the general you have more lead time to get more people, as opposed to the primary which was earlier this year. People return, and then we supplement that with new recruits," said Nago.
See the original article at: KHON2 Local News
