Arkansas has nothing on Saline County when it comes to early voting. A total of 1,350 Saline Countians cast ballots Monday on the first day of early voting, shattering the previous first-day turnout record of 471 voters set in 2004.
“If this trend continues, it’s going to be something,” County Clerk Freddy Burton said this morning.
“Normally, turnout keeps growing, it’s like a wave and just gets bigger. It may drop off some from Monday but probably not a lot. We may know a little more today.”
Statewide, about 22,000 people voted early on Monday, according to the secretary of state’s office.
Burton said earlier that he expects record voter turnout for the Nov. 4 general election in Saline County, which has 63,355 registered voters. Burton is predicting turnout of 70 percent or higher locally.
Secretary of State Charlie Daniels of Bryant also is predicting record turnout statewide. He said he expects between 65 percent and 70 percent of the state’s 1.68 million registered voters to cast ballots.
“When you look at what Saline County did Monday, it’s pretty amazing,” Burton said.
“We had 1,350 people turnout and Pulaski County, the state’s most populated county, had about 5,000 people vote early. They have about 300,000 voters.”
“We usually see those sorts of numbers toward the end of early voting period,” said Kent Walker, chairman of the Pulaski County Election Commis-sion.
Voters waited for at least two hours to vote at one west Little Rock polling site.
Early voting in Saline County continues through Monday, Nov. 3, at the Voting Center on Main Street in Downtown Benton. Burton said early voting lines formed on the sidewalk outside the Voting Center.
Early voting hours are 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays and 8 a.m.-5 p.m. on Nov. 3.
A majority of the registered voters in incorporated Saline County are in Benton. The city has 17,580 registered voters, according to the county clerk’s office, followed by Bryant, 9,281; Shannon Hills, 1,656; Haskell, 1,649; Alexander, 1,107; Bauxite, 326; and Traskwood, 313.
There are 5,907 registered voters in Hot Springs Village who live in Saline County and there are 25,536 registered voters in unincorporated Saline County.
More than 11,000 Saline Countians voted early in 2004, according to the county clerk’s office.
Nearly 10,000 Arkansans have cast absentee ballots for the Nov. 4 election, the secretary of state’s office said.
High turnout also was reported in Benton County, where about 2,000 people had voted by late Monday afternoon.
In Washington County, 1,412 voters cast ballots Monday — representing about 1.4 percent of the county’s registered voters.
“We have been incredibly busy but I’m not surprised,” Washington County Clerk Karen Combs Pritchard said. “We’ve got great people working. Things have gone smoothly.”
In the 2004 general election, about 760 people in Washington County voted on the first day of early voting, Combs Pritchard said.
In Miller County in southwest Arkansas, election officials said they also saw steady turnout at early voting sites. Miller County Election Commission Chairman Larry Dowd said that by mid-afternoon, the county had seen about 400 people cast ballots.
“There seems to be a whole lot of first-time voters in this bunch,” Dowd said.’
If Daniels’ turnout prediction comes true, that would make turnout the highest since 1992, when then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s race for the White House helped drive more than 72 percent of Arkansas voters to the polls. In 2004, 63 percent of the voters cast ballots in the presidential election.
Voter turnout was 78.8 percent in Saline County in 1992, but Burton has said that number is deceiving because it was more difficult for people to register to vote at that time. The county had 36,230 registered voters in 1992.
Burton said voter registration increased significantly after passage of the “Motor Voter” Act in 1993.
Whit Jones of the Courier and Andrew DeMillo of The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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