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May 2019 Voter Turnout Barely Improves Over Last Municipal Primaries

Steve Burns
/
WTIU

Just 13 percent of eligible, registered Hoosier voters cast a ballot in May’s municipal primaries.

 

That’s barely an improvement over the last municipal primary elections in 2015. In Allen County, which had a contested mayoral Republican primary in Fort Wayne, voter turnout was 14 percent.

 

Huntington County had 25 percent of registered voters cast their ballots. Wells County had 20 percent.

 

The state's numbers don’t include 23 counties that didn’t have primary elections this year.

 

Voter turnout in primaries is typically low – only one in five Hoosiers cast a ballot in May of 2018, which featured a competitive U.S. Senate primary. And the presidential primary in May 2016 only drew a little more than a third of eligible voters to the polls.

 

Martin and Rush counties posted the highest turnout this year, while Putnam and Tippecanoe counties came in the lowest, with just 2 percent turnout.