Halloween has arrived, but this year, the real scares might still be lurking around the corner, as Election Day approaches.
Thousands of Fairfax County voters have already cast a ballot, either in person at one of the county’s 16 early voting sites or by mail.
According to data provided by the Fairfax County Office of Elections, there have been 253,265 ballots counted as of Tuesday (Oct. 29) — amounting to a 34% turnout so far for the county’s 745,645 registered voters. Nearly 182,000 ballots were cast in person.
Driven partly by an expansion of absentee voting due to the pandemic, a record-high number of votes were cast in the last presidential election in 2020, though turnout fell short of the record set in 2016.
Open through Nov. 2, the voting sites are generally seeing minimal wait times, except for the Franconia Governmental Center, which is averaging 28 minutes compared to the two to 16-minute waits seen at other sites, according to a new tracker provided by the elections office.
With control of the White House and Congress on the line, and concerns about safeguarding the voting process in the news both locally and nationally, are you getting your ballot in with time to spare, or are you holding out for Election Day — assuming you plan to vote at all?
