Big early-voting turnout in St. Mary

Like people around the country, St. Mary voters are turning out in record numbers for early balloting.
A total of 9,650 St. Mary people had cast in-person early ballots by Monday. Tuesday is the final day of early voting for the Nov. 3 election. St. Mary people can still vote early until 7 p.m. Tuesday at either the St. Mary Parish Courthouse in Franklin or the Registrar of Voters Office at 301 Third St. in Morgan City.
Another 1,131 mailed ballots have been received. Most mailed ballots can be accepted until Nov. 2, and military ballots get an extra day.
The 9,650 in-person votes represent about 29% of the parish’s 33,233 registered voters. It also exceeds the total early vote in the presidential election of Nov. 8, 2016, when the early voting period was shorter. The early votes that year totaled 6,935.
This year’s early voting, extended because of COVID-19, will have run Oct. 16-27, excluding Sundays.
Efforts to reach out to senior citizens for mail-in ballots even before the presidential primary in July have also paid off. When early in-person voting began, the Registrar of Voters Office had already received 826 mail-in ballots.
As of the weekend, more than 760,000 people had voted early in Louisiana.
National media put the number of early voters nationwide at about 62 million, exceeding the total in the 2016 race. That year, Republican Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received a total of about 138 million votes between them.
The surge in early voting is widely attributed to two factors: the bitterly fought presidential race between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, plus hotly contested U.S. Senate races; and attempts to encourage early mail-in and in-person voting to reduce crowding at polling sites on Election Day as an anti-coronavirus measure.
The emphasis on early and mail-in voting has generated questions around the nation about the time needed to count mailed ballots in particular and about whether the winner will be known on Election Day.
Early and Election Day in-person voting will be conducted on machines that generate results on a cartridge and on paper, according to information from Jane Pilant, chief deputy to Clerk of Court Cliff Dressel, and Registrar of Voters Jolene Holcomb.
When the voting period is complete, cartridges from machines in west St. Mary are delivered to the courthouse, and cartridges from east end machines go to the Registrar of Voters Office on Third St. in Morgan City.
After the polls close Nov. 3, the voting information from the cartridges will be loaded into a computer and placed on a thumb drive or memory stick. Then it’s uploaded to computer again and transmitted to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The counting of mail-in ballots begins when the polls close.
Along with weighing in on the presidential race, St. Mary voters will also help settle the races for U.S. Senate and 3rd Congressional District seat.
Two races will pick judges for the 16th Judicial District, which covers St. Mary, St. Martin and Iberia parishes. Voters will also decide the district attorney contest.
Seven state constitutional amendments are on the ballot, along with a parish-by-parish proposition that if passed would legalize gambling on sports.
And in Morgan City, voters will pick a new mayor and settle council races in districts 3 and 5.
The print version of this story was based on voting numbers through Saturday. The online version has been updated to include Monday's vote count.