Turnout for 2019 election was 45.2%
Fewer than half the registered voters in Ulster County cast ballots in the fall 2019 election, despite the addition of nine days of early voting and a hotly contested race for county district attorney, according to the county Board of Elections.
A total of 53,626 voters, 45.2 percent of the 118,518 who are registered in the county, participated in the election. Of those who cast ballots, the board said, 999 didn’t vote in the district attorney’s race, which Democrat David Clegg won by a scant 78 votes over Republican Michael J. Kavanagh after a drawn-out recount.
“Just based on experience ... that number seems extraordinarily high in a contested race,” Republican Elections Commissioner Thomas Turco said. “If it was an uncontested race, I wouldn’t give it a second thought.
“For a contested race, it’s kind of high,” he said. “It jumped out at us here at the office, too. I noticed it immediately.”
Turco said an additional 39 ballots in the district attorney’s race were either cast for write-in candidates or were voided.
The county’s party leaders said they, too, were surprised by the number of voters who chose not to cast ballots in a race that was seen by many as the key contest in the 2019 election.
“Without doing a comparison [to the number of blank ballots in other countywide races], it is striking,” said Democratic Committee Chairman Frank Cardinale. Also running in contested races were candidates for county executive and county comptroller.
“We get that where the races are uncontested. A lot of people just won’t vote on that line, that’s not atypical,” Cardinale said. But he called it “puzzling” in a contest that was as closely watched as the district attorney’s race.
“I don’t have an answer for it, and I don’t have a remedy for it,” Cardinale said of 999 people not voting in the race.
County Republican Chairman Roger Rascoe said, “I don’t have an explanation as to why there were so many blanks on the DA race. It’s just the nature of elections.”
Both Rascoe and Turco said it’s possible that many of those who didn’t cast ballots in the district attorney’s race went to the polls specifically to cast ballots for a particular candidate.
“Some folks vote locally and don’t care about the others,” Rascoe said. “I do
believe that there are some folks that go out and vote for their friends, and that’s it.”
Rascoe, though, said he is certain that no registered Republicans intentionally skipped voting in the district attorney’s race.
According to the Board of Elections, of the 53,626 registered voters who
cast ballots, 24,562 of the 47,933 registered Democrats, the largest voting bloc in the county, turned out; and 13,733 or 27,864 Republicans voted.
Also voting were 1,254 of the 2,459 registered Conservatives; 2,043 of the 5,799 Independence Party members; and 11,505 of the 33,101 voters who are not enrolled in a political party.
Other political parties in the county have fewer than 600 registered voters.