BUFFALO (WBEN) - The 2019 election cycle marked the first year in which early voting became a mandated process from Albany.
While local election commissioners noted that they weren't given much time to prepare for a drastically new system, things came together fairly well considering the circumstances.
"We were very pleased that the turnout was up from four years ago," said Republican Election Commissioner for Erie County Ralph Mohr. "We were also pleased that the early voting results meshed in with the results from last night and we were able to produce the totals for the public. Much of this was the first time that we attempted to do so; we didn't have very much time to test the equipment, and our staff did a wonderful job in making the patches and making the presentations on the website that were required to be able to have an election night result program."
In total, roughly 26,000 people took advantage of the early voting process, which is 12.6% of Erie County residents who actually voted.
"We were training poll workers for 37 sites over nine days, so we had about 400-500 workers, which we had to train on early voting procedures, which was different from normal election day procedures," he said.
When asked about what could be improved or added to the process to make things even better for next year, Mohr noted that they haven't been able to study all of the facets to this point, but he says one trend they noticed was a significant decrease in the number of requested absentee ballots, which they still have to count.
"We're going to then take a look and analyze early voting," said Mohr. "Did it add to the number of people who came out to vote, or were those people going to come out to vote on election day anyway?"
