Benton-Franklin Voter Turnout ‘Leaps’ To Nearly 25% on Election Day

So the next time city council members, or school boards members, or other elected126K officials do something you do not agree with, remember whether you voted.

With today, Tuesday (August 3) being election day for the primary, and in Benton County also the special Sheriff recall vote, we have seen a bit of surge in ballot returns.

As of noon, Benton County had raised its return rate from 18 to 24 percent. Out of over 126K registered voters, that's still not very much. It's interesting there are a couple of major spikes in ballot return data.

Benton County, via the Auditor's office, shows big spikes July 19, 26 and this last weekend. That would indicate a lot of voters chose to spend part of their weekend filling out their ballot and returning it.

In Franklin County, their return rate rose from 11 to just over 16 percent. The last two days saw the county receive by far the most ballots returned. Monday, 1,042 were dropped off or received, the most since they were sent out.

Get our free mobile app

Because people can still drop off ballots till later in the day, and if postmarked no later than today, mailed-in ballots will be accepted, we could see a few increases in these percentages.

However, despite this improvement, it's likely Benton will finish with under 30 percent participation, and Franklin likely less than 25 percent.

That's not exactly doing our civic duty, now is it? Like we said, the next time an elected official proposes or does something we don't like, if you didn't vote, you can't really complain, can you?