VOTER TURNOUT: Where was everybody yesterday?
Arkansans voted yesterday in primary and judicial races. Well, some of them did.
Only 20.6% of registered voters in Arkansas turned out yesterday, the lowest percentage of registered voters to hit the polls in a primary in a presidential year in more than a dozen years.
The 357,920 Arkansans who cast ballots yesterday were the fewest since 2012.
The award for highest turnout yesterday goes to Lee County with 40.61%, but only two other counties (Cleburne and Hempstead) cracked 30%.
Desha County had the lowest turnout yesterday with a paltry 11.61% and Woodruff County had the fewest voters with 586.
There weren’t a lot of big draws on the primary ballot this year, which surely contributed to the lower turnout. A pair of state Supreme Court contests and a Republican primary challenge to Rep. Steve Womack in Northwest Arkansas were the biggest draws this year.
Compare this year’s turnout numbers to the turnout in 2020 and 2016 when flashier races were on the ballot. In 2020, when Covid was beginning to rise, Joe Biden was running against late entrant Mike Bloomberg and others.
That year, 28.01% of registered Arkansans turned out and cast 487,409 ballots. Twenty-eight counties hit 30% turnout that year.
In 2016, when a bombastic former real estate developer and a former Arkansas First Lady were on the ballot, 38.39% of Arkansas voters cast ballots. More than 640,000 Arkansans voted that year, and only three counties failed to reach 30% turnout.
The numbers were low for Pulaski County this year too. Yesterday, 20.97% of voters turned out in Pulaski County. That was down from 30.01% in 2020 and 39.26% in 2016 but better than the 17.2% in 2012.
