More than half of registered voters in Vermillion County participated in the May 3 Indiana primary.
With 51 percent of those voters casting ballots, Vermillion led all Hoosier counties, according to figures released Friday morning by Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson’s office. Of the county’s 10,097 registered voters, a total of 5,163 voted. Lawson congratulated Vermillion in a statement.
By contrast to Vermillion, neighboring Vigo County stood near the bottom in the state with a voter turnout at 35 percent. The statewide turnout for the primary was 38 percent of registered voters.
Tim Yocum, the Republican Party chairman in Vermillion County, called his county’s outcome historic. He cited the interest in New York billionaire Donald Trump’s candidacy for the high volume. “I think it’s people are sick of how everything is going, and Trump is the factor,” Yocum speculated. Trump received 1,748 votes for the Republican presidential nomination, tops in Vermillion County, though Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders cumulatively got 2,383 votes.
Yocum also credited successful youth voter registration drives at North Vermillion and South Vermillion high schools for part of the turnout.
A purging of inactive voters from the registration rolls, started in 2009, has probably helped improve Vermillion’s turnout percentages, said Florinda Pruitt, the county clerk. “We weeded out people that had moved, died, whatever,” she said. Vermillion also posted a relatively high turnout in the 2014 midterm primary election, 30 percent — the fourth-best in Indiana.
As for Republican Trump’s effect on turnout, the county saw 51 percent of voters request Democratic ballots and 49 percent took Republican ballots. Typically, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a higher margin, she said. “So a lot of people that tend to vote Democratic voted Republican this time,” Pruitt said, “but we’ll see.”
The November general election, likely pitting Trump against Clinton with a broader electorate, may alter the proportions. “I think the big story will be in the fall,” she said.
Vermillion County conducts elections on the traditional precinct system, where voters go to polls in their home neighborhoods.
Only 12 other counties of Indiana’s 92 had lower percentages than did Vigo, including a few other urban counties such as Delaware, Lake, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh.
All of the nearby Wabash Valley counties were higher than Vigo — Greene at 45 percent, Sullivan 43, Clay 41, Parke 40 and Putnam 39.
“That’s disappointing,” said Carolyn Callecod, president of the League of Women Voters in Vigo County. “We are trying very hard in getting people interested in registering to vote and coming out to vote.” The league conducted registration drives at the local high schools and candidate forums, and hope to coordinate registration drives with the Terre Haute NAACP chapter.
On Monday, the league plans to attend a meeting of county Election Board to ask that three-member panel to add a voting center on the Indiana State University campus. The university offered to purchase the voting equipment and donate it to the county so a polling site could go on campus, but the ISU proposal fell one vote shy of the required unanimous vote by the Election Board to pass.
Callecod believes a vote center at ISU, where more than 14,000 students and 1,500 employees are concentrated, could raise Vigo’s overall turnout. “We’re hoping that having a voting center at the Indiana State campus will encourage students, faculty and staff, and residents living nearby to vote, and that will raise the [county] turnout,” Callecod said.
Several elections ago, Vigo switched from precincts to voting centers. The change reduced the number of polling sites but allows voters to use whichever site they choose.
In early and Election Day voting, a total of 1,771,753 of Indiana’s 4.7 million registered voters cast ballots, leding to the 38-percent statewide voter turnout.
Ironically, Vigo had the second-highest percentage of voters who cast ballots in early voting opportunities. Those absentee early ballots accounted for 35 percent of Vigo’s total votes.
In actual numbers, 18,039 Vigo Countians voted in-person on May 3, while 9,802 voted early. Only Cass County, home of Logansport in north-central Indiana, had a higher rate of early voting at 47 percent. “We had a lot of people vote early, which was wonderful,” said David Crockett, Vigo County clerk.
Statewide, 16 percent of Hoosiers — 282,288 total — used early voting sites in the primary, an increase from 11 percent in 2008 and 12 percent in 2012.
The report from Lawson’s office suggested that “candidates and issues continue to drive turnout in elections,” calling Indiana’s voter turnout this year “comparable” to the 2008 primary. That year involved the high-interest Democratic presidential nominee race between future President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it drew 40 percent of registered Hoosiers in the primary.
In 2012, just 22 percent of Hoosiers voted in the primary.
This year’s balloting involved presidential races between Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who led the Indiana Democratic voting, and Trump and Ted Cruz on the Republican side.
“When Hoosiers are excited about candidates, it drives turnout,” Lawson said in the news release. “When you compare the turnout numbers for this year and 2008, the last time presidential candidates were in the state, you can see a correlation. When voters are motivated, it gets them to the polls.”