Early voting is up from February

Chicago’s early voting numbers are up from the February election but still behind the same point in the last mayoral race, according to Chicago election officials.

As of Thursday, 75,534 people had voted early in Chicago, and over 59,000 applied to vote by mail, according to Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman JimAllen.

At this time in February, with four days left for early voting, only a little over 60,000 people had voted early, according to numbers provided by the Chicago Board of Elections.

The early voting numbers fall short of the turnout for the last municipal election in April 2015, which had over 142,000 by the time early voting ended, according to numbers provided by the Chicago Board of Elections. However, this year’s numbers could catch uptoApril 2015’s in the final days, according to Allen.

“Chicago isn’t on pace to set any local records for municipal turnout,” Allen said in the email. “We’d certainly like to see well over 40 (percent) but it’s too soon to say whether we’ll get that.”

Chicago’s voter turnout for municipal elections is typically higher than other large cities, including New York, Los Angeles or Miami, each of which had voter turnouts of less than 25 percent in 2017, according to numbers provided by Allen. In the suburbs, the turnout is usually between 13 and 23 percent, Allen said in the email.

“Chicago will easily surpass those cities’ turnouts, even with 151,000 more voters on the rolls than we had in 2015,” Allen said in the email.

The ballots are short, only including the mayor, treasurer, and alderman in wards where the race went to a runoff, so Allen said the election administration has “exceptional capacity” to handle thousandsmore voters each day.