Tuesday is the runoff election in the Chicago mayoral race, with numbers showing residents preferred early voting to in-person when choosing to replace Lori Lightfoot as mayor.
Close to 300,000 Chicago residents cast their ballots before Election Day. Chicagoans cast a record-high 30,044 votes on Monday, according to the Chicago Board of Elections. Polls were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, and the elections board reported 33.2% total citywide turnout as the polls closed.
CHICAGO MAYORAL RACE: RUNOFF CANDIDATES RESUME ATTACKS AS ELECTION APPROACHES
“Turnout has been strong and swift heading into Election Day,” Board of Elections Chairwoman Marisel Hernandez said at a Tuesday morning news conference, according to the Chicago Tribune. “Today is the last chance for voters to have their voice heard.”
Hernandez added that voters may not know who the next mayor will be by the end of the day.
Tuesday’s race will mark the end of a fierce battle between candidates Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas, as one of them will be charged with dealing with the city’s rising crime, declining education, and rebuilding the economy in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pair ousted incumbent Lori Lightfoot, who was mayor since 2019, in the general election.
Voters will decide between two Democrats: Johnson, a more liberal candidate who promises to reform policing and education with changes in mental health and affordable housing, and Vallas, a centrist who advocates stronger policing and approaches education with a fiscal perspective.
The runoff election is on track to make city history, following similar trends that led to the Feb. 28 general election becoming the most popular early-voting election in Chicago’s history.
In this year’s runoff, 292,591 ballots were cast before Election Day. That number includes early voting and mail-in ballots. This election has seen more early ballots than during the first round of voting in February, Chicago Board of Elections Spokesman Max Bever told the Washington Examiner.
“It’s following along similar trends to the election we just had on Feb. 28. So, a lot of the turnout’s been pretty similar,” Bever said. “We’ve had kind of a slow, sleepy Election Day.”
At the end of Election Day, there were 530,382 total ballots cast. That number included early voting and mail-in ballots received by Monday. Any further ballots will be added on a rolling daily basis beginning Wednesday.
Another 91,838 mail-in ballots have yet to be returned, Bever said, but not all are expected to be mailed on time or postmarked properly.
“We went into Feb. 28 with 100,000 outstanding vote-by-mail ballots, and in the two weeks after, we got just over 52,000 back,” Bever said. “So, I imagine we’re probably looking at pretty similar return rates, you know, with the 91,000. You know, from [45,000]-47,000 possibly coming back in the next two weeks.”
Bever said he expected vote totals to exceed the Feb. 28 election at somewhere between 36% to 38% of all registered voters. The votes won’t be called by the Chicago Board of Elections until approximately April 20, he said.
“If it is a close race, the mayoral campaigns may want to keep an eye on how those results come back day after day until the math is a little bit more clear,” Bever said. “If it’s a race within the 40,000 votes, or within just a few percentage points, it will probably take a while for the campaigns to feel comfortable conceding.”
Election officials had also described day-of voting on Feb. 28 as “sluggish,” with the day ending at a 36% turnout, slightly less than previous elections.
Similar to the general election, voters 55 and up led the way in voter turnout, Bever said. Voters aged 55-64 cast 97,708 ballots, 18.42% of ballots cast, and voters aged 65-74 cast 89,845 ballots, 16.94% of ballots cast.
Polling conducted prior to Tuesday showed that voters aged 65 and older were throwing their support behind Vallas at 50.6% and 53.4% for those aged 50-64.
Voters aged 18 to 24 voted the least in the runoff election, casting 20,989 ballots, or approximately 3.96% of ballots cast.
The most active voting precinct is Cook County Jail, the first jail in the United States to operate as a precinct with in-person voting in March 2020.
Bever said it is likely the 2023 runoff election will have more ballots cast than in 2019 and possibly 2015 — the only two years where there was a citywide mayoral runoff in a nonpartisan election.
In February 2015, the turnout was close to 35%, and turnout for the April runoff went up to 41%, Bever said. Bever pointed to a lower population rate of 1.4 million registered voters in 2015 compared to almost 1.6 million registered voters in 2023.
“So that tends to always drive down those turnout numbers, but given that municipal elections generally see or do see the lowest turnout for the city of Chicago, seeing even just a little bit more turnout just is at least a little bit more exciting,” Bever added.
Chicago already reported some issues with voting locations on Tuesday. Bever said 14 polling locations delayed opening on Tuesday morning. Several locations also still fail to comply with requirements set in the Americans with Disabilities Act — on the Feb. 28, just a third of locations were fully accessible by ADA standards.
Other municipalities in the state faced disruptions, as well. In Highland Park, which was holding its own elections on the same day, Braeside Elementary School, Red Oak Elementary School, and Highland Park Public Library went into lockdown at about 11:50 a.m. CDT following a heavy police presence at Highland Park High School. In total, the three locations served as polling locations for 16 precincts.
“HPHS has been placed on a lockdown due to a report of a student potentially in possession of a gun at school. There are no reported shots fired,” the high school said in a statement.
Numbers provided to the Washington Examiner showed that 17,866 voters would be affected by the three lockdowns.
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Polling ahead of the Chicago runoff election showed Vallas holding a slight lead over Johnson.
A Victory Research poll released Sunday night shows Vallas with a 4-point lead over Johnson, 49.6% to 45.4%. The number of “undecided” voters shrank from 9.6% to 5%, according to the poll.
