The dictum to vote early and often seems to have been taken to heart by a fair number of voters in Alamance County, who’ve been showing up at the polls in record-setting numbers ahead of Tuesday’s primaries.
By the time that polls closed for early voting on Saturday, the local election office had amassed 11,172 ballots from area voters who took advantage of the state’s 15-day period to get a jump on this year’s party preliminaries on March 3.
This total is nearly twice the 5,780 early ballots that the election office had logged before the last “mid-term” primaries in 2022. It also exceeds the 8,077 early ballots that the elections office received ahead of the primaries in 2024 – when voter turnout was buoyed by that year’s presidential election.
In spite of this year’s unusually high turnout, things seemed to go relatively well at the county’s three early voting locations – at least during the first 11 days of the early voting period. Last Wednesday, Alamance County’s election director Dawn Hurdle told The Alamance News that none of the county’s early voting locations had been overwhelmed by the unusually high turnout.
“It’s been very smooth,” Hurdle acknowledged at the time. “Everybody’s been gracious, and we have our wait times posted online. But I do foresee long lines on Friday and Saturday; there are usually long lines at the end of the early voting period.”
It remains to be seen whether the high numbers for early voting will carry over to the actual date of the primaries on March 3. In recent years, the ballots cast during early voting have constituted roughly a third of the overall vote count for party preliminaries. In 2022, for example, early entries in that year’s primaries accounted for just over 31.1 percent of the 18,559 ballots recorded, while in 2024, they amounted to 31.2 percent of all ballots cast.
It remains to be seen whether the heavy early voting turnout reflects an increase in overall turnout, or simply an acceleration in the same, relative total turnout.
Turnout during this year’s early voting period was especially brisk at Burlington’s Kernodle Senior Center, where 4,454 people had voted during the 15-day period. Meanwhile, 3,997 voters had cast their ballots the Graham Recreation Center, while another 2,721 had done so at the Mebane Arts & Community Center.
Hurdle said that the senior center’s high numbers can be partly explained by the distribution of early voting locations ahead of this year’s primaries.
In 2024, voters from the Burlington area could visit either Burlington’s Elmira Community Center or the South Gym in Elon to cast pre-primary ballots. As a result, these two sites trailed the Graham Rec Center and the Mebane Arts Center in their overall turnout. Meanwhile, in 2022, the Graham Rec Center witnessed more volume than the Kernodle Senior Center when these two locations were the only two pre-primary voting sites in Alamance County.
