photo by: Ashley Golledge

Jamie Shew has served as the Douglas County Clerk since 2004. He is currently in his fourth term of office. He is pictured outside the Douglas County Courthouse on Thursday, Oct. 15, 2020.

With 7,068 ballots tallied, voter turnout for Tuesday’s primary elections for Lawrence City Commission and a school board seat was 10.28%, Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said Tuesday — not a big departure from the last off-year primary election.

“It was pretty close to what we saw with the 2021 primary,” Shew told the Journal-World.

Shew said in-person voter turnout during the morning hours Tuesday was lower than he anticipated, but that the pace picked up during the afternoon and “turnout recovered a little bit for the day.”

Vote-counting for the 82 precincts was completed at approximately 8:40 p.m., Shew said, and “everything went real smooth.”

“You could tell in a number of precincts that turnout was good,” he said. “Because we have a huge number of students who don’t vote in August, you kind of need to look precinct by precinct.”

Shew added that advance mail ballots postmarked by Tuesday and received by Friday could still affect outcomes, as well as provisional ballots. Shew said that he only anticipated “a couple hundred” provisional ballots, but that the official total would not be known until the canvass on Aug. 14.