PEORIA, Ill. – There were some hiccups along the way, but for the most part, the new paper-based voting system in Peoria County worked pretty well.
That’s according to Peoria County Election Commission Executive Director Thomas Bride, who says there were some glitches, but he wasn’t that worried about it.
“It’s new to us, so we were kind of making sure we were going slow and methodical to make sure we’re doing it right,” said Bride. “We just don’t have a lot of experience with the system. So, I think for us, a lot of it was, we were just trying to do slow and methodical.”
Bride says there might have been more issues for some of the election judges who hadn’t worked with the system before either, but he says on the whole, the judges were very conscientious.
Voter turnout in Tuesday’s primary election was pretty much in the middle of what has been seen in previous primaries — at least in Peoria, according to Bride. Bride says turnout, nevertheless, was better than he thought, at more than 18 percent.
“We weren’t where we were four years ago, but we are…a couple points ahead of where we were eight years ago,” said Bride. “It just depends on what’s going to drive people to the vote.”
But, Bride says there was a bright spot: the number of people who chose to either vote early, or vote by mail.
“We ended up about 30 percent up on early voting from where we were in 2018, and we’re probably going to end up maybe 80 our 90 percent up on vote-by-mail from where we were in 2018,” said Bride.
Bride says vote by mail has been increasing — at times significantly — since it’s been available, and like early voting, he expects that to continue to increase as well.
