The Aurora area saw low voter turnout in this year’s primary election on Tuesday, according to officials from local counties.
In Aurora, residents across four counties voted in the primary race for mayor, which is a nonpartisan election. Aurora residents in Kane County also voted in three Aurora Township races featuring Democrats, which are partisan contests.
Election stories can be found at aurorabeaconnews.com and will be running in the Thursday print edition of The Beacon-News.
For these races, Kane County is seeing “very low turnout,” according to Kane County Clerk John Cunningham. He said 2,793 people had voted on election day by around 4 p.m.
Polls were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.
However, around 890 people cast their ballots early, and the county had received around 1,356 mail-in ballots, Cunningham said.
The voter turnout was sitting at around 6%, but he said he hoped that number would reach up to around 11% voter turnout, which the county saw in the consolidated primary election four years ago.
In DuPage County, where voters in Lisle also headed to the polls for a number of primary elections, 1,659 people had voted on election day as of 3:33 p.m., according to county officials. Before election day, 814 people voted early, while 3,499 voted by mail, officials said.
So, voter turnout in DuPage County was around 5% at around 3:30 p.m., according to DuPage County Chief Deputy Clerk Adam Johnson.
He said that spring consolidated elections always have lower turnouts than presidential or gubernational election years, but this is the “first year in quite a while that DuPage has even had a primary for a very small fraction of the number of races on the consolidated ballot,” so there is little data to compare this year’s turnout to in order to say whether or not turnout was high or low.
In Kendall County, where voters in Oswego also headed to the polls in a Republican primary for Village Board trustees, 413 people had voted on election day as of 3 p.m., Kendall County Clerk and Recorder Debbie Gillette said in an email. That’s in addition to 55 early votes and the 150 mail-in ballots received so far, she said.
Since Gillette said that 28,264 people were eligible to vote in this primary election, that means voter turnout was around 2% at 3 p.m. According to Gillette, that was lower than the only other consolidated primary election that the county has held, which was in 2023.
Will County, where voters in Homer Township also headed to the polls for a number of primary elections, saw 3,135 voters on election day as of 4:40 p.m., according to county officials. The county also had 247 ballots cast early and 527 mail-in ballots returned so far, officials said.
Since officials said that 36,497 people were eligible to vote in this primary election, that means voter turnout was almost 11% as of 4:40 p.m.
On the ballot in the Aurora mayoral primary were Ald. John Laesch, incumbent Richard Irvin, Ald. Ted Mesiacos, Karina Garcia, Judd Lofchie and Jazmine Garcia, who recently suspended her campaign and endorsed Laesch.
Aurora residents were asked to vote for one mayoral candidate, with the top two finishers in the primary moving on to the April 1 general election.
The races for Aurora Township posts were all Democratic party contests, so only Democratic voters who live in the township could vote in these primaries. There were no Republican party contests to be voted on in the primary in Aurora Township.
The Democratic contests in Aurora Township included races for clerk between Adam Pauley and Angela Thomas and highway commissioner between incumbent Jason Owens and Donald Ishmael. The winners in these contests move on to the general election in April.
There was also a contested race for Aurora Township Board in the Democratic primary, with residents asked to choose four candidates to move on to the general election.
Running in the primary were Bonnie Lee Kunkel, incumbent Samuel Nunez, Jerria Donelson, incumbent Dolores Hicks, Mansa Latham Williams, Danny Taylor and Sherry Spears. The top four vote-getters move on to the April 1 election.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com