Not enough Lexingtonians are voting early. Blevins sounds alarm on Election Day lines.
If more people don’t start voting early, Lexington residents can expect extremely long lines on Election Day, Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins warned Tuesday.
Blevins pleaded in a post on Reddit for voters to “please go as soon as you can.”
“We must do better or face the consequences on Election Day,” he said.
Blevins is hoping 25,000 people will vote in Lexington each week leading up to Election Day in order to avoid long lines. Right now, that’s not happening.
“This week is starting off very slow,” Blevins told the Herald-Leader. “If we backload everyone at the last minute, we’re going to have problems.”
So far, 19,565 people have voted in person in Fayette County and around 64,700 absentee ballots have been received by the Fayette County Clerk’s Office. That’s 33.6 percent of the 250,698 registered voters in Fayette County and 60.4 percent of the 139,390 voters who turned out for the 2016 presidential election.
“That’s way low,” Blevins said.
Both U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Amy McGrath have voted early in the 2020 election and have implored their supporters to do the same. Blevins said he fears long lines on Election Day, where Fayette County only has eight in-person voting locations compared to the 145 that normally exist on Election Day.
That has the potential to disproportionately affect Republican voters since more Democrats have requested mail-in absentee ballots out of concern for the COVID-19 pandemic. An October 7 Gallup Poll found that nationwide, 62 percent of Democrats plan to vote early and only 28 percent of Republicans said the same.
At a Republican rally at Whitaker Bank Ballpark, U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, told his supporters it was “OK if you want to vote in-person early”
“You need to make way.... for the scores and hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of Donald Trump voters who are going to vote on Election Day,” Barr said.
Barr is in the midst of an aggressive campaign against Democratic nominee Josh Hicks in a district President Donald Trump won by 15 percentage points in 2016 but has been trending Democratic since then.
In Jefferson County, 58,844 people have voted in person and the Jefferson County Clerk’s office has received 77,105 ballots, as of Tuesday morning, which is 21.4 percent turnout for the 632,848 registered voters in Jefferson County. Louisvillians accounted for 358,678 votes in 2016.
In Kenton County, 10,702 people have voted in person and 14,779 ballots have made it to the County Clerk’s Office, for 17.8 percent turnout. That equals 34.6 percent of the 73,631 people from Kenton County who voted in 2016.
Neither the Fayette County Clerk’s Office, the Jefferson County Clerk’s Office nor the Kenton County Clerk’s Office provided a breakdown of votes by party registration.
Across the state, 378,352 voters had sent in their ballots through Monday and 318,425 people had voted in person, putting turnout at 19.5 percent so far.
This story was originally published October 20, 2020 at 3:13 PM with the headline "Not enough Lexingtonians are voting early. Blevins sounds alarm on Election Day lines.."
