SAFFORD — The Graham County Board of Supervisors had a special meeting for one item Wednesday — canvas the vote totals from the March 19 Presidential Preference Election.
Despite more than a quarter of Graham County’s registered voters unable to cast a ballot — the election was only open to registered Republicans and Democrats — county Elections Director Hannah Duderstadt said voter turnout was good.
“We had a total of 14,453 registered voters for this election, and that is for both the Republican and Democratic parties. We had a total of 4,425 ballots cast. That was . . . about 471 ballots cast on Election Day and then the rest was mostly early ballots, and then the late early ballots and provisionals. So voter turnout came to be 30.6 percent,” Duderstadt said.
There were 2,712 early Democratic ballots requested, with 1,033 (38 percent) returned. Meanwhile, there were 6,313 early Republican ballots requested, with 2,916 (46 percent) returned.
There was one issue on Election Day, when the vote pads stopped communicating with the printers. However, Dudstadt said she and the IT Department were able to obtain repair instructions from the vendor and no one was prevented from casting a ballot.
“Thankfully, we have a work-around. So when the printers aren’t working, the voters can still vote. We have those express votes as a back-up,” Duderstadt said. “We only had a few showing up, so we asked them to do the express vote until we could get our printers working. We got it resolved and after that, we had no issues. The rest of the day was real smooth.”
Donald Trump captured 87 percent of the 3,328 Republican votes cast; however, there were 39 votes cast for other Republicans on Election Day, despite all the other candidates having dropped out of the race.
President Joe Biden received 82 percent of the 1,082 Democratic ballots cast, with almost all votes for other Democrats cast early.
The next election is the July 30 primary for federal, state and local elections. Voters must be registered by July 1 to vote in the primary and independent voters may select Democrat, Republican or non-partisan ballots on which to vote.
