Cameron County’s turnout on Nov. 8 wasn’t as impressive as it was during the 2018 midterm election, but it was still pretty impressive.
That’s according to county elections Administrator Remi Garza.
“We saw about 32, 33 percent of our overall registered voters come back to the polls, but I think that it’s important to recognize that over 77,000 ballots were cast in Cameron County, which is for a midterm so incredibly high,” he said. “Even though it didn’t reach the 2018 turnout, it’s still pretty incredible for a midterm election to be having that many people participate.”
Turnout was close to 45 percent in 2018, Garza said.
“Of course we had a smaller number of registered voters at the time,” he said. “My goal has always been to increase voter participation. We do everything we can to get people registered so when they want to vote they can. Each election cycle we’ve seen a higher and higher level of participation.”
It’s a far cry from the days when the midterms were an afterthought for most voters, Garza said. This time around, high-interest races on the state and national level as well as competitive county judge and city commission races helped drive turnout, he said. Garza said the 2022 midterm election was pivotal in the sense that it seems to reveal an emerging pattern in voter participation.
“Either the races are becoming more energizing and contentious, and so more people are getting engaged, or we’re just seeing a new approach to elections, where people are participating at higher levels than they have in the past,” he said. “2018 was so high that it seemed like an anomaly, that it was a one-off type situation, but with this turnout clearly our midterm elections are gaining a lot more interest and a lot more participation than they ever have in the past.”
All the same, Nov. 8 was a “pretty normal election for Cameron County,” with the usual bumps and false starts at some polling places, though with judges generally doing their jobs well and voters exhibiting patience with the long lines that can be a hazard of waiting till Election Day to vote, Garza said. That’s why he strongly encourages voters to take advantage of early voting each election, he said.
“It was a regular election,” Garza said. There were more poll watchers during this election, and that raised the level of tension in the polling places for some of our poll workers. But all in all everything went pretty well. We didn’t have any instances of concern from the voters, so it was a successful election as far as I’m concerned.”
The official numbers will be presented to the relevant governing bodies within 10 to 14 days, once provisional ballots are reviewed and late mail-ind ballots and overseas ballots from service members are counted, he said.
