Tuesday’s voter turnout in Kane was even more dismal than in 2017

GENEVA – The turnout for Tuesday’s consolidated election was worse than it was in 2017, Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham said.

In 2017, turnout was a miserable 15.71%, where 39,112 of the registered 248,904 voters bothered to make it to the polls, according to the clerk’s voting records.

The unofficial turnout for this year’s consolidated election was 11.04%, as 35,133 of the registered 318,299 voters voted – 3,979 fewer than in 2017.

But the results as of Friday are still unofficial, Cunningham said, as 1,400 mail-in ballots still have time to come in and be counted.

“In this election, even though we argue it’s one of the most important for local taxes, maybe it was because so many were uncontested,” Cunningham said. “‘Vote for three’ and only three ran.”

Cunningham said he also thinks that people are just burned out from the last four years of presidential campaigning.

“We’ve done everything we can. Early voting. Mail-in voting,” Cunningham said “We have given people every opportunity to vote.”

Ken Shepro, a Kane County Board member and chairman of the Kane County Republicans, said turnout was so bad that some precincts had less than 2% of voter turnout.

“There were some precincts where voter turnout was 1%,” Shepro said. “It should be disappointing to everyone that after we had an election with a record high turnout in November, we have an election with an all-time record low turnout.”

Echoing Cunningham’s comments, Shepro said the local consolidated election is where “95% of what goes into your tax bill – your real estate tax bill – was at stake in the races of the offices being elected.”

This election also had a record number of uncontested races or offices without even enough candidates to fill them, Shepro said.

He also contributed the lack of interest to exhaustion from the November’s national election.

“In part, what we are seeing is political fatigue, election fatigue,” Shepro said. “People are so tired of the toxic level politics seemed to have descended to that people don’t want anything to do with it. And that ranges from not voting to not even running for office.”