Clerk: Porter County early, mail-in voters have cast nearly 46K ballots

More than a third of Porter County’s registered voters had already cast an early ballot either in person or by mail by Friday afternoon, with the number of walk-in voters alone topping the total number of ballots cast in the primary.

The numbers are unprecedented, said Clerk Jessica Bailey.

“We’ve never seen this volume,” she said.

By 3 p.m. Friday, 33,748 voters had visited one of the county’s five early voting sites or its mobile voting unit, and early voting continues all day Saturday and until noon Monday. In the June primary, voters cast a total of 33,627 ballots.

Additionally, the county had received 12,158 ballots in the mail by Friday afternoon as well. Between all the early ballots so far, Bailey estimated just over one-third of the county’s registered voters have already selected their candidates.

The number of early voters, she said, has been trending up.

“It’s only increasing and this year it’s astronomical,” she said.

After an assortment of court challenges, mail-in ballots are due by noon Tuesday to be counted in the election. Voters who have run out of time to put them in the mail so they’ll arrive in time can drop them off at one of the county’s early voting sites or bring them to Elections and Voter Registration, 155 Indiana Ave., Suite 105 in Valparaiso by noon on Tuesday, Bailey said.

The county’s election board voted Thursday to begin processing early ballots at 6 a.m. on Election Day, she said. Bipartisan teams of poll workers will begin opening them then, Bailey said, and once all the ballots from a precinct are open, the ballots can be run through the county’s high-speed counter.

Any ballots received by the noon deadline that day will be run as supplements.

Bailey is confident that election officials will have the results Tuesday, even with the large number of ballots that will go through the counter.

“We’re going to keep running until we have them,” she said.

For more information on early voting, go to http://porterco.org/1111/ Early-Voting.