Photo: Stock Pexels Sora Shimazaki
June 21, 2021 By Christina Santucci
More than 35,000 Queens residents cast their ballots during the past nine days of Early Voting for the Primary Election, the city’s Board of Elections said Sunday night.
Early Voters in Queens made up about 18.5 percent of the total 191,197 people citywide, according to unofficial and cumulative counts as of close of polls.
As of Friday, the BOE said it had also received more than 68,000 absentee ballots and expected that number to grow.
Queens’ 35,361 Early Voting check-ins was significantly lower than that in Brooklyn, which had 65,516, and Manhattan, which reached 60,649. However, Queens topped the number of Early Voters in the Bronx – 20,590 – and Staten Island – 9,081, the BOE said.
Brooklyn has the highest number of registered voters, followed by Queens and then Manhattan, according to state voter data from February. Manhattan has about 2,300 more registered Democrats than Queens, but Queens has more than 42,000 more registered Republicans, according to the data.
The number of Queens residents who checked in for Early Voting this month is about 3.5 percent of the total number of registered Democrats and Republicans in the borough.
This month’s Early Voting counts are also a fraction of those tallied for the November 2020 election – a presidential election – when nearly 1.2 million people across the city went to the polls over a nine-day period.
During the November election, 250,083 people voted early in Queens, and the borough’s total came in second only to Brooklyn’s 373,270 early voters, the BOE tweeted at the time.
Presidential elections typically draw the highest voter turnouts.
However, election officials had even added 10 more hours of Early Voting this year – up from 73 in November – bringing the total time that polls were open to 83 hours over the past nine days.
Registered Democrats and Republicans have one more day – Tuesday – to vote in person in this month’s Primary Election. Polls will be open from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m.
Those who requested and received absentee ballots can also drop them off at any polling place or Board of Elections office Tuesday or put them in the mail. Ballots must be postmarked no later than June 22, the BOE said.
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So where do we go?