With one week to go until primary Election Day, voters took advantage of early in-person voting Tuesday, pulling the lever at polling places statewide.
The primaries tend to have low voter turnout, but election officials said the gubernatorial primaries this year could very well lead to a bump in people coming out to cast their ballots.
“With the different people that are running for governor, I’m definitely predicting a higher turnout,” said Jill Moyer, chairwoman of the Mercer County Board of Elections.
Added Nicole DiRado, administrator for the Union County Board of Elections: “Because of the volume of candidates on both the Democratic and Republican primary tickets, we are expecting there to be more voter awareness and more anticipation and excitement over the election.”
At polling places in Union County, “selfie stations” were set up to encourage voters to post about early voting, maybe helping further boost turnout.
“We rolled out the selfie stations during the presidential primary election,” said DiRado. “They didn’t take off last year as I was hoping they would, so I’m hoping, like everything else in our culture and our elections, it takes a few years.”
As of Tuesday morning, 271,457 mail-in ballots have been received statewide; 205,261 from Democratic voters and 65,899 from Republican voters.
In 2021, the last year to feature a gubernatorial primary, the voter turnout was 12%.
