photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

A sparse crowd votes at about 8 a.m. at the Carnegie Building in downtown Lawrence on Nov. 4, 2025.

Voter turnout in Tuesday’s elections in Douglas County was nearly 25% — similar to the past few off-year elections — according to the unofficial data from the Douglas County Clerk’s Office.

With 100% of precincts reporting on Tuesday night, voter turnout was at 24.2% in the unofficial results. They showed 19,468 ballots cast out of 80,393 registered voters in the county.

Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew told the Journal-World that’s similar to the turnouts of the past two off-year elections, in 2023 and 2021.

“This is very much like the turnouts we’ve had for a city-school general election,” Shew said.

In 2023, as the Journal-World reported, the official turnout after the canvass was just over 26% with 20,680 ballots cast.

Shew said that turnout did pick up a bit in the afternoon on Election Day this year, but that the split of mail ballots vs. in-person ballots was about the same as it usually is.

He noted that some ballots have yet to be reflected in the count, including some mail ballots that were dropped at drop boxes. And mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day still have until Friday to arrive. In total, he estimated about 500 ballots could still be added to the totals.

As for the counting itself, Shew said everything went smoothly.

“It went really well,” he said.

This year’s canvass will be held on Monday, Nov. 17.