photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Elections Office on West 23rd Street is pictured on July 13, 2022.

Despite turnout far heavier than even many general elections, Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said voting went smoothly during the Tuesday, Aug. 2 primary.

Not long after the polls closed Tuesday night, Shew said he estimated turnout may well have reached around 40,000 ballots cast, roughly half of the county’s 81,117 registered voters. Nearly half of them were advance ballots cast in-person or mailed ahead of Aug. 2.

“This is off the charts,” Shew said. “A Douglas County primary is usually like 15,000 to 19,000, and we’re way above that.”

In the first batch of results shared by the elections office around 7:30 p.m., about 20% — or 16,531 — of the county’s registered voters had cast a ballot. That was just a portion of the advance ballots sent via the mail or cast in person.

Updates from the elections office in mid-afternoon noted that voter turnout was so heavy that workers at polling places weren’t able to answer the phone to report updated voter numbers from their locations.

Shew said this was a trend that continued even after polls officially closed at 7 p.m. The flow of voters throughout the day Tuesday, even in less-populated precincts throughout the county, implied that turnout was “huge,” Shew told the Journal-World.

As of 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, there were more than 29,000 ballots and counting listed in the county’s unofficial election results, and Shew said he didn’t have an estimate on when they’d be finished.

But the massive turnout didn’t really cause any issues during election day itself, Shew said, nor did a rash of poll workers calling in sick ahead of election day.