Both the Bloomington Election Commission and the McLean County Clerk’s office are seeing strong turnout for early and mail-in voting.
Bloomington surpassed 8,000 early votes by the end of the workday Thursday. Luke Stremlau, executive director of the BEC, said early voting numbers are up compared with the 2020 presidential election.
“We've got roughly 51,000 registered voters in Bloomington, and the numbers I've crunched, about 14% have either voted early or voted by mail,” said Stremlau. “We are expecting to see a lot more vote-by-mail come in, and there's still 2 1/2 weeks of early voting. So truly, we could have 20% of registered voters voting before the election.”
The county clerk’s office — which handles all voting in the county except in Bloomington — has received about 6,500 ballots, split almost equally between early and mail-in voters. Mark Senger, co-director of elections, said it is still too early to know whether their numbers will beat what was seen in 2020. In terms of mail-in ballots, Senger said the office is processing roughly 500 to 600 per day, depending on how many are shipped from the U.S. Postal Service.
Equipment testing
The county clerk’s office will hold a test of the automatic tabulating equipment at 1:30 p.m. Oct. 24 in the basement of the Government Center in downtown Bloomington. The meeting is open to the public, as it has been in previous elections.
Illinois state law requires pretests to ensure voting equipment can detect voting defects and count votes cast for all offices and measures. Senger said previous tests, though open to the public, have not been attended by any voters not there on behalf of their county political party.
“We want to be public. We want to show that we're transparent,” said Senger. “Where there's no stuff going on or election rigging, because we have checks and balances and we put our names on and when we proclaim the election, we sign our names off on this, and if the numbers are off, we have to report that.”
A new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed almost six in 10 Americans say they’re concerned or very concerned that there will be voter fraud this election.
“There is some [extra skepticism from voters], but that is something that we can absolutely combat with education,” said Stremlau from the BEC. “So informing the voters of what we do and showing them the process is how we typically try to be as transparent as possible.”