Northwest Iowa– The 2020 general election was Tuesday and voters across the state turned out in record, or near-record numbers.
While voter turnout here in our local four-county area of O’Brien, Sioux, Lyon, and Osceola counties wasn’t record-breaking, voter turnout was still quite high. All of the auditors from these four counties took some time to run us through the turnout that they all saw during the election.
(as said) “Yes, we had a really good turnout, we had 76.51% I was very pleased with the way things turned out. We had a lot of new workers for this election and things went very very well.”
That was O’Brien Counties Auditor, Barb Rohwer, talking about the numbers O’Brien county saw. Next, we hear from Jen Smit, Lyon Counties Auditor.
(as said) “We had, not quite 80%, 79.70% turnout, with 6,924 out of 8,688 votings, in 1016, in the last presidential (election), it is roughly the same, I haven’t checked completely,” Smit explains, “But we were just short of 80% there too. Absentees are defiantly more predominant this year.”
According to Smit, Lyon County saw a very similar turnout since the 2016 election, but the numbers they have are still nothing to sneeze at. Looking next at Osceola county, their auditor being Rochelle Van Tilburg.
(as said) “We had 3,346 people that voted so that’s like 77.8%. Four years ago we had 3, 251 people who voted at the polls. Our absentees were way up this year, we counted 1,472 and four years ago we had 876 so that was way up.” Says Van Tillburg.
Last, but not least, we hear from Ryan Dokter, the Auditor for Sioux County.
(as said) Dokter says, “I wouldn’t say it’s record voter turnout, we typically have pretty high turnouts so, unofficially we are at about 83.14% turnout of our registered voters, you know, in that election (referring to the 2016 election) Officially we had 83.5% turnout, so we are right in line with that, but again for a general election, Sioux County is generally in that ballpark for turnouts.”
Any questions about the current election and voting should be directed to your auditor’s office.
