Even as candidates for the D.C. Council scrambled Monday to seal the deal with voters, nearly 7,800 District residents didn’t need to listen. They had already voted.
On the eve of Tuesday’s primary election, council candidates fanned out across the District hoping to secure the support of voters who are casting ballots for the first time since one since Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas Jr. resigned and a grand jury blanketed the Wilson Building with subpoenas amid two federal corruption probes.
Only one of the contests on the ballot — that for an at-large seat on the D.C. Council — is open to voting by registered Democrats throughout the city. The other contested Democratic races are restricted to Wards 4, 7 and 8.
| District, Md. vote Tuesday |
| Polls in the District and Maryland will be open between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. Tuesday for Republican and Democratic primaries. |
District Republicans will cast ballots in their party’s presidential primary, and Ward 7 Republicans will pick a nominee for this fall’s D.C. Council race.
By Monday, voters had already cast 1,733 absentee ballots. Another 6,051 residents voted early in person, and while that’s down substantially from 2010, when more than 21,000 voted early, that’s not necessarily an indication that overall turnout will be low this year, according to Chuck Thies, a Democratic political consultant.
“2010 was a mayoral election into which more than $6 million were poured,” Thies said. “Comparing it to the 2012 primary is an apples-to-oranges miscalculation.”
Early voter turnout was heaviest in Ward 3 even though its council representative isn’t on the ballot. The voting center in the Upper Northwest ward accounted for 27 percent of total early voter turnout.
In Ward 2, the downtown area with the second-highest number of early voters, incumbent Councilman Jack Evans is unopposed in his bid for re-election.
But in Southeast Washington, where the two Democratic council members representing areas east of the Anacostia River are fending off intraparty challengers, early voting lagged. In Ward 8, where Councilman Marion Barry is seeking a third consecutive term, 370 people voted early. Another 496 people voted in Ward 7, a politically active section of the city that is considering Councilwoman Yvette Alexander‘s future on the council.
Alysoun McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the city’s elections board, said early voting turnout isn’t considered an indicator of how many residents will vote Tuesday, partly because the District has same-day voter registration.
“It’s not really something we do to try to pin a precise turnout estimate,” McLaughlin said.
