About 10% of Arlington voters have cast ballots today, as of 9 a.m., as Election Day got off to a relatively smooth start.
Arlington County Director of Elections Gretchen Reinemeyer said there have been no significant delays or reports of any major confrontations at the local polls so far.
“Everything that we’ve been seeing from the field suggests that voting has been going very smoothly today,” she said.
The majority of Arlington registered voters — about 55% — have now cast ballots. A substantial chunk of the county voted early this election cycle, with about 74,323 of 164,107 registered voters casting ballots either in person or by mail, according to the county’s election dashboard.
Rob Farber, chief election officer at the Wakefield High School voting precinct, said he has seen some confusion this year over ranked choice voting, with about 45 of 530 ballots cast so far marked as “spoiled.”
“We’ve been attempting to get [voters] to understand you only vote one in each column and one in each row and so forth,” he said. “But … for most of them, it’s a new experience, and sometimes our words don’t click with what they’re doing, and that’s what’s causing the problem.”
Voters with spoiled ballots must re-submit their votes using a new ballot, and spoiled ballots are accounted for in an audit at the end of the day.
Reinemeyer noted that it is difficult to compare any of this year’s voting numbers — in the midst of a historic presidential election — against other recent years.
“You can’t compare this election cycle to last year’s. Last year’s was the lowest turnout election in a four-year cycle,” she said. “And … we can’t compare this election to 2020, because that was the pandemic and we say a large number of voters voting before Election Day.”
Reinemeyer suggested comparing numbers against older records. In 2016, a record high of about 122,000 Arlington voters cast ballots, representing around 82% of the county’s registered voters.
ARLnow reporter James Jarvis contributed to this story.
