Nearly 22,000 people have already voted in DeKalb County: Election 2024

SYCAMORE – DeKalb County Clerk and Recorder Tasha Sims said on Monday that nearly 22,000 ballots, including early and mail-in, have already been cast in DeKalb County for Tuesday’s general election.

It’s a trend seen nationwide for those seeking to skip the day-of lines as Election Day inches closer.

She said before the DeKalb County Legislative Center, 200 N. Main St., in Sycamore opened Monday morning, a group of people had gathered, hoping to cast their vote ahead of Election Day.

“There was a line out the door and there pretty much has been the whole time,” Sims said. “I would expect that for most of the full day. We have been averaging in the Sycamore location about 600 voters a day, which is a lot. It is a lot, a lot.”

Early voting begin in DeKalb County on Sept. 26 and continued through Monday. Sims, who was voted into her office in 2022, said voter turnout is dramatically up from the previous elections she’s conducted as the Clerk and Recorder.

As of 11:30 a.m. on Monday, 21,800 votes had already been cast, Sims said. Of that total, a little more than 17,000 are early and grace period votes. The rest are mail-in ballots, she said.

Sims said that’s a lot more early voters than what has been cast in previous elections, but said it’s difficult to compare to the most recent presidential election.

“The hard part with 2020 is it happened during [COVID-19],” Sims said. “We had like 20-some-thousand vote-by mail ballots, so it’s really just kind of shifted more of the vote by mail to the early voting, it kind of seems like.”

Of the ballots that had already been cast, 871 were from voters who had not previously registered or needed to update their address at the polling place, Sims said.

On Tuesday, 363 election judges will work the polls for 69 precincts across all of DeKalb County’s townships. Sims said that while she has more than enough election judges, because of what she called “pretty high turnout rates” in some of the county’s precincts, she doesn’t know how busy some polling places will be.

Voters should be prepared for a potential for busy polling sites Tuesday.

“I’m not exactly sure what to expect for some of them, if they’re going to be busy or having a lot of these early voters will allow it to be steady but not overwhelming,” Sims said. “We don’t have a really good baseline, necessarily to judge off of because 2016 vote by mail really wasn’t what it is now, and then 2020 was [COVID-19] ... We’re ready and prepared for an extremely busy day tomorrow if it comes.”