Despite a slew of highly contested races, four out of five Kansas voters will sit out Tuesday’s primary, officials said Friday.

Secretary of State Chris Biggs said he hoped turnout, which he tabbed at 19 percent, would be larger, and urged Kansas voters to prove him wrong.

He even egged on Kansans by noting that in Missouri, officials were predicting they’d see a 24 percent turnout.

A 19 percent turnout in Kansas would mean 324,000 votes out of 1.7 million registered voters would cast ballots.

It would be lower than the 2008 primary turnout of 22.45 percent, but more than the 18.2 percent in 2006.

Of the state’s registered voters, nearly 745,000 are registered as Republicans; 490,000 unaffiliated; 460,000 Democrat.

In Douglas County, officials are predicting a 20 percent turnout for the Republican Party primary and a slightly lower number for the Democratic Party primary.

Statewide, advance voting has increased. As of 8 a.m. Friday, 80,494 advance ballots had been mailed, 49,381 had been returned and 12,423 additional ballots had been cast at satellite voting locations, the secretary of state’s office said.

Gov. Mark Parkinson said there were a number of “interesting races,” although he declined to predict any outcomes.

The state’s leading race is for U.S. Senate to replace Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who is running for governor. Two veteran U.S. House members, Jerry Moran, R-Hays, and Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, face off in the GOP primary, and five Democrats are dueling for their party’s nomination.

And there are contested Republican and Democrat primaries in all U.S. House races except on the Democratic side in District 1.

“You have to go back more than 10 years — to 1996 — to find a highly contested primary for the U.S. Senate,” Biggs said. “And you have to go back more than 15 years — to 1994 — to find as many open congressional seats,” he said.

But working against a high turnout was the fact that there are only 36 contested primaries in the Legislature, and non-presidential year primaries usually have lower turnouts.