Monroe County early voting continues brisk pace, ends at noon on Monday, Nov. 4
At 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, under clear skies and a temperature of 37 F degrees, a line of voters stretched from the door of the Monroe County election operations building at 3rd and Walnut streets, around the building, down 3rd Street, nearly to College Avenue.
At 9 a.m. when the door opened, the line shrank, but more voters filled in the ranks at the tail end. By 10 a.m. the end of the queue still stretched to mid-block between Walnut and College.
The first voter in line emerged from the exit just about 5 minutes after going into the building. A handful of others, wearing “I voted” stickers, came out around the 10-minute mark.
The day before, on Friday before the Tuesday, Nov. 5 election, better than 200 voters per hour voted early in person at the election ops building.
That worked out to a total of 2,255 voters over the 10 hours that the polls were open. Even though that eclipsed the next-highest daily total for this year’s election by around 450 votes, it still fell about 300 votes short of the same Friday total in 2016.
The B Square is benchmarking early-voting totals against 2016, instead of 2020, when voting patterns were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Friday was the first day during the four-week early voting period when the 2024 daily total has not been better than the corresponding day in 2016. But this year’s total through Friday is 27,783, which already has surpassed the early in-person total from 2016, which was 27,024.
Rough projections by the B Square, based on advanced voting totals, would put the total turnout for this year at around 69,000, which would be about 9,000 better than in 2016.
There are around 95,000 registered voters in Monroe County.
Early voting on Saturday continues through 4 p.m. On Monday before Election Day, early voting starts at 8 a.m. and stops at noon.
Election night reporting to the public of Monroe County’s unofficial election results will see a slight change this year. The email distribution list of .pdf files containing the initial unofficial reports will include a .csv (comma separated value) file which is computer-readable.
The addition of a .csv file in the distribution protocol was the outcome of a working group meeting on Friday morning. The working group had been asked by the election board, at a mid-October meeting, to make a recommendation.
Attending the working group meeting were: election board member John Fernandez, county election supervisor Kylie Farris, Monroe County Democratic Party chair David Henry, county GIS coordinator John Baeten, and Monroe County elected surveyor Trohn Enright-Randolph (by video conference).
On election night, Baeten will also be receiving preliminary unofficial results data files and uploading them to a reporting platform that he has built. Baeten demonstrated the platform at Friday morning’s working group meeting. Baeten will be making final tweaks, and by Monday, expects to be able to distribute the public URL for the reporting platform.
At the Friday morning meeting, Farris and chief deputy clerk Laura Wert noted that over the course of the evening on Tuesday, the distribution of the .pdf reports and the accompanying .csv file will not be done any more frequently than in the past.
Based on past patterns, that means the public can probably hope to see some initial results posted by around 7 p.m. after the polls close at 6 p.m. The initial batch of numbers is typically made up of all the advance voting—early in-person, and mailed-in absentee, as well as travel board ballots.
After the initial batch is released, subsequent intermediate batches, before the final one of the night, are released as time permits. As the ballots and results are delivered by the election workers from all the different voting locations in the county, there’s a fair amount of intense activity. The focus is on making sure all the materials delivered from the field are slotted into the right spots.
