(Seguin) — If you were among those who came out to cast your ballot on election day, then you were among the majority of voters in Guadalupe County who also did the same thing.
Guadalupe County Elections Administrator Lisa Hayes says during Tuesday’s General Election, most of the 120,065 registered voters opted to come out on election day rather than vote early.
“We had a lower turnout for early voting than we were expecting. We thought we would see a little more of our voter participation than we saw but actually the voters more than made up for it on election day. We had on election day 17, 973 voters come out and vote and that was actually almost double what we had on election day on the presidential of 2020. We had a little over 9,000 vote on election day in the presidential of 2020 so voters definitely came out and made their voice heard,” said Hayes.
While the choice to exercise their right on election day may have caused a few challenges for her office staff and election judges, she says it was always something that they knew they could handle.
“Because so many voters came out to vote on election day at 7 o’clock when the polls closed, there was a large number of people that were still in line waiting to vote so it took longer for the results to be released because we had to wait for those locations to exhaust the line and let all the voters who were in line at 7 p.m. vote and then pack up and bring everything back so that made things take a little bit longer than I know everyone would have liked and then we had a couple minor technical difficulties throughout the day that caused us to scan a voting location – part of their ballots here at the central count election night – nothing that we couldn’t handle. It just had to be done and it’s required time because we wanted to make sure we did it right so the ballot board met and had to process mail ballots and all of these things take time and then when we are trying to make sure we answer voters’ calls and support our election judges out in the field, it just takes time and it takes people and we do our best but sometimes, things just don’t go as quickly as we would like for them to go,” said Hayes.
Hayes says the important thing is that the process ran as smooth and convenient as possible.
“It was a rough day in some ways because we had lines. We weren’t expecting quite that much of a turnout, and it was a longer ballot so the voters, I appreciate their patience. I know the last thing anybody wants to do is come stand in line for something, but I think voting is important and we got everyone through the line as quickly as we could and appreciate the support that the community is showing for our local judications and for the governmental process in general,” said Hayes.
Hayes says much of the prep work in planning for an election begins months in advance. Guadalupe County on Tuesday operated with 34 election day polling locations across the county.
Guadalupe County utilizes vote centers, which means voters could cast their ballots at any one of the available polling locations.