During the first week of November residents in cities across the country headed to the polls to cast their votes in city elections. Staff at the Carroll County Courthouse have been hard at work tabulating voter turnout with results released earlier this week. Official numbers show that only 24.67% of registered voters in Carroll cast their ballots with a total of just 2,324 residents turning out to vote in person, or by absentee ballot, out of 7,336 registered voters. Breaking down the demographics by age: 18–24 year olds had a voter turnout of 2.46%, voters ages 25–34 had a 9.57% turnout, while ages 35–49 had a slightly stronger showing with a 19.93% turnout. Voters ages 50–64 had a 29.25% voter turnout while people ages 65 and over had an even stronger voter turnout of 41.42%.
Prior to the official results many elected candidates running for seats on the Carroll City Council had expressed that they felt a younger voter demographic may have been part of the reason for their successful election based on early absentee voting numbers. However, broken down older voters outpaced their younger counterparts in the number of absentee votes cast with 280. Younger absentee voters were outdone, even when combining the age ranges to include everyone between the ages of 18 and 64 with a total of 234 absentee votes. Broken down: 18-24 year olds cast 7 absentee ballots, with ages 25-34 casting 25 absentee votes, 35-49 year olds cast 86 absentee votes, while those between the ages of 50–64 cast 116 absentee votes. Yet, the younger demographic was not to be outdone at the polls on Election Day with a combined total of 1,009 ballots cast while those ages 65 and older cast 801 ballots at their designated polling places. Broken down the younger demographic had a showing of 17 ballots cast at the polls for those ages 18–24, 25 votes were cast by 25–34 year olds, those ages 35–49 cast 320 votes at the polls while those ages 50–64 cast 557 votes on Election Day.
A full breakdown of voter turnout in each of Carroll’s four wards is available here: Carroll Demographics November 3 2015 election. Early next week we’ll have results from the demographic break down for all of Carroll County.
