PEORIA, Ill. — Early on Election Tuesday, electronic pollbooks were delivered to the wrong location, causing a 25-minute delay in voting at Northwest United Methodist Church on War Memorial in Peoria.
That was one of the only snafus of the day, said Peoria County Election Commission Executive Director Thomas Bride.
“For a Presidential election, it went really smooth,” he said.
“In a typical election, we have a couple hiccups here and there. Usually some human error.”
Bride said generally speaking, the day was boring.
“Compared to earlier year, Election Day turnout was really light for a Presidential, but I think that’s indicative of the fact we had massive turnout for vote-by-mail, and we had a record turnout for early voting,” he said.
Tazewell County Clerk John Ackerman said that was basically the story in his locality, too.
“We saw a much higher new voter registration number than what we anticipated,” he said. “Other than that, we wrapped up our election by 9:00, which has never happened in Tazewell County.”
Ackerman said a new streamlined process bore fruit.
“[It] really kicked into gear this time. We smoothed everything out and we got all of our precincts in and accounted for by 9:00, which is much, much improved over years past when we were so late in getting our results reported,” he said.
Ackerman praised the elections judges but lamented a lower participation than he anticipated.
“I was projecting 75,000 total ballots, but we’re sitting at almost 69,000, so not quite as heavy of a turnout as I was originally participating but, still, that’s a 73% turnout,” he said.
“Overall, I hope the taxpayers are happy with what they’re seeing out of this election.”
