If it seemed like there were more people voting in this year’s presidential election, Perry County Clerk Jared Kutz said it wasn’t your imagination. The voter turnout was a record-breaker. “Kudos to the voters of Perry County,” he said. “We actually had more voters than have ever voted in an election in Perry County before. In 2016, we had 8,870 voters. In 2020, we had 9,495 voters. I was really hoping to hit the 10,000 voter mark this year, but we didn’t quite get there. I’ve got a few provisionals that we’re still adding and late-arriving absentees that we’re still adding to the official numbers, but even with those, we’re not going to cross 10,000.
“Still, it was just an unbelievable turnout by our county and community, and I’m pretty excited about that. My judges had a great day. Nothing came up that was out of the ordinary or anything we’re not accustomed to. It was just all around, overall, a great day. It’s always good when that doesn’t happen.”
According to Kutz, the number of absentee voters in the county wasn’t anything to sneeze at either. “It was actually unbelievable, is what it was,” he said. “Several years back, the Missouri Legislature approved a two-week period during COVID-19, where they allowed folks to come in who had various concerns about voting at the polls. They turned that into what is now called a two-week no excuse voting period. We had 810 voters, I believe, in 2016, that voted absentee. In 2020, we had 1,687. In walk-ins alone this year, we had over 2,500 mail-in and walk-in absentees, but the largest majority of those came in through the doors of my office. Kudos to my staff for going through that. It was crazy."
“We had a couple of election judges that came in and worked the absentee poll in my office the last days of that period. We had one day where we had over 380 people come in and vote in the office. It was quite incredible. While we have more registered voters in the county now than we have at pretty much any previous time, we actually had fewer voters eligible to vote on election day. In contrast to 2016, we had almost 11,000. This year, we had under 11,200. It was impressive. I think that before going into election day in 2016, we had 9.13 percent of our registered voters that already cast a ballot, and 17.3 percent had already cast a ballot going into election day. This year, we were at 19.9 percent of our registered voters who had already cast a ballot.”
Kutz greatly appreciated the extra workload taken on by his office staff and election judges this year. “I cannot thank them enough for all they do,” he said. “I tell them all the time — it almost sounds cliché — the way I always thank them. We didn’t have complaints on election days of long lines. It was pretty impressive overall.”
