Counties are seeing an increase in Absentee Voters

WEBSTER & OKTIBBEHA COUNTIES, Miss. (WCBI)- Election Day is in one week.

While candidates continue to ask for your vote, it is the workers behind the scenes who are getting ready for people to cast their vote.

Circuit clerks are already busy with what they tell us are an increase this year in absentees.

For some voters, making it to the polls next Tuesday just isn’t possible.

Instead, they vote early with an absentee ballot.

This year there are more people casting that early ballot than usual.

“It’s going really well. I would say we have about triple what we had in June. We had about 40 some odd Absentee ballots well, of course, we are a small county, but we have around 124 right now,” said Sherry Henderson.

And it’s not just the primary seeing a boost.

“Four years ago this same election every four years we have this particular type of election, and we had a little over 300 absentee voters four years ago, and we are topping 900 right now, and we still have a week to go,” said Sheryl Elmore.

In Oktibbeha County, Deputy Election Clerk Sheryl Elmore has seen her share of elections. She says local interest is driving the vote.

“I feel a lot of that is from the Chancery court race. We’ve always had the Chancery judges that have been there forever and never had opposition, so we never had people running against them, and now they are all retired At the same time and so now that is open. We have five candidates in 14-1 and two candidates in 14-3, and that’s a lot of interest there, so that’s brought a lot of people out,” said Elmore.

“Every day we have probably 8 to 10 people coming in which is like I said unusual for our county but we are just glad people are getting out and voting,” said Henderson.

Webster County Circuit Clerk Sherry Henderson says the busiest day is still to come.

“Usually the last Saturday before the election does bring out those few that something has come up at last minute so yeah we look to see more people come out Saturday,” said Henderson.

Saturday is the last day to cast an absentee ballot.

The votes will then be counted after the polls close on November 6th.