Early turnout in Tompkins County dropped ahead of the Special and Primary Elections on June 24, drawing fewer than half the early voters seen in 2023. Voters had nine days to vote prior to the Special and Primary Elections to cast their early ballots.
421 early in-person votes were cast in Tompkins County this year. In an interview with The Ithaca Voice, Tompkins County Democratic election commissioner Steve DeWitt said that represented a significant drop from the 2023 local primary elections, in which 741 people voted early.
The total number of early voters this year represents just 0.703 percent of the total active voters registered in Tompkins County as of February 20. There were no notable spikes in early voter turnout, with 61 votes cast on the most active day and 38 on the slowest, DeWitt said.
DeWitt suggested the drop could be due to primaries being held in all five city wards and the town of Caroline in 2023, which likely boosted participation, compared to a relatively smaller field of three competitive primary races this year.
In previous years, including in 2024, there were multiple early voting locations, though that was reduced to just Ithaca Town Hall this year. DeWitt attributed this to the absence of primary elections east of the City of Ithaca, where the other early voting site is typically located near the airport. He said that the fall elections will once again feature two early voting sites.
“We only had primary elections in three of the five wards in the city and in the towns of Caroline, Danby and Newfield,” DeWitt said.
This year, 282 ballots were issued by mail, and 80 have been received before election day. DeWitt noted that in a general election, about 80 to 90 percent of mail-in ballots are typically returned to be counted. However, for this election, the number of mail-in ballots returned was much lower.
“This election is probably not going to break 50 percent,” DeWitt said.
Cereese Qusba is a reporter at The Ithaca Voice and a news editor at The Cornell Daily Sun working on The Sun’s summer fellowship.
Cereese Qusba is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a news editor for the 143rd Editorial Board. She can be reached at cqusba@cornellsun.com.
