Election Day in Chicago: Live updates as voters head to the polls

The threat of severe weather didn’t affect city voter turnout Tuesday in a bitterly contested runoff race for mayor, though storms did temporarily knock out power to four polling places.

Despite brief outages at precincts in the 29th, 31st, 35th and 37th wards, election officials reported that voting on Election Day went smoothly, aided by early voting.

As polls closed at 7 p.m., the Chicago Board of Elections reported 33.2% total citywide turnout.

At a midday news conference, officials said they expected vote totals to slightly exceed the Feb. 28 election at between 36% and 38% of all registered voters. Tuesday’s totals will likely change once mailed ballots and provisional ballots are added to the totals.

Mail-in ballots can be counted as long as they are postmarked by Tuesday and received by April 18.

Top voter turnout was reported in the 19th, 41st, 11th, 13th and 47th wards, according to Board of Elections spokesperson Max Bever. Fourteen polling places reported delayed openings Tuesday morning, with three being in the 6th Ward.

At Aspira Early College High School in the Avondale neighborhood, the site experienced an outage between 45 minutes to an hour. It remained open and voting machines, registration iPads and the ballot box operated on battery backup, election judge Dan McDonough said. A few emergency lights cast some light in the room, and voters relied on cellphone flashlights to see their ballots, he said.

About 15 voters came in during the outage, election coordinator Kelsey Kamp said. It was a slight rush for the day, potentially because neighbors working from home also lost power and took a break to leave their houses, Kamp said.

The battle between liberal reformist Brandon Johnson and moderate Paul Vallas, who defeated first-term Mayor Lori Lightfoot and emerged from a field of nine candidates to advance to the runoff, has emerged as one of the most-watched political races in the nation.

Race, crime, education and city finances became key issues, as the two candidates offered starkly differing visions on how they would lead the nation’s third-largest city.

Voters were also selecting aldermen in 14 wards where races advanced to runoffs and choosing officials in several suburbs.

In the 19th Ward on the city’s Southwest Side, voters in two precincts filed into the elegant lobby of Donnellan Funeral Home to cast their ballots, surrounded by a chiming grandfather clock, a wood-paneled ceiling and stuffed armchairs.

Inside the funeral home that has been a polling place some three decades, Del Wilkins, 68, cast his ballot for Vallas, calling public safety and Vallas’ work experience deciding factors. Johnson’s ties to the Chicago Teachers Union and what Wilkins described as “flip-flopping” statements on defunding the police, as well as the thought he would tax businesses, were concerning to Wilkins, who said he is president of a local company.

Antoinette King, 59, came to the early voting Loop Super Site shortly after polls opened to vote for Johnson. She voted for Willie Wilson in the Feb. 28 election, and then voted for Johnson who she said she likes because he is Black like herself, sends his kids to Chicago Public Schools and lives on the West Side.

“He says he wants to bring justice,” King said.

She told the Tribune that before she lived in Wicker Park, she was a longtime resident of the South Side and saw the need for more police firsthand and thinks that Johnson wants the same.

Patrick Aziz, 27, arrived at Oriole Park School in the 41st Ward around noon to vote in his second election ever — his first time voting was during the first round of the election on Feb. 28.

He was spurred to vote the first time because he was tired of Lightfoot, he said. The recent Nashville school shooting was a wake-up call that got him to come out again to vote in the runoff, he said.

Aziz, a police officer, planned to vote for Vallas, and said his desire to have resource officers in schools was a key issue to him.

“I just feel like his policies will get the city back on track,” he said.

Carmencita Perez, 58, brought her 6-year-old granddaughter to vote with her and her husband Tuesday in the Little Village neighborhood. She said she voted for Johnson because he lives in a similar community to hers in Little Village and says he won’t turn Chicago Public Schools into charter schools.

“(Johnson) has a lot to learn, but I also really believe that he has the best chance of listening to us as people because he is one of us,” Perez said.

Liam O’Connor, 57, has lived in the 47th Ward for about 30 years after growing up in Ireland and spending time in the Chicago suburbs. The Lincoln Square resident voted for Vallas because “I’m fed up with the crime, fed up with the crime, fed up with the crime,” he said.

“I think Vallas is our last chance,” said O’Connor, who is a contractor.

Among the votes received before Election Day, the number of mail-in ballots was up compared with previous years, and voters continued to cast ballots in significant numbers at early voting sites. On Monday alone, residents cast a record-high 30,044 early votes, according to the Chicago Board of Elections.

This mirrored a trend seen in the Feb. 28 election, which made city history for being the most popular for early voting. Day-of voting for the Feb. 28 election was described as “sluggish” by officials, with the percentage of registered Chicago voters who turned out to vote being slightly less than recent elections at about 36%.

In the runoff, 292,591 ballots were cast before Election Day, including early votes and ballots received by mail by the Board of Elections, Bever said, which was more early ballots than during the first round of voting in February.

Another 91,838 mail-in ballots have yet to be returned, though the Board of Elections didn’t expect all of them to be mailed back on time or properly postmarked.

Like the Feb. 28 election, voters ages 55 and older are leading the way in voter turnout, according to Bever. Voters ages 55 to 64 and 65 to 74 are just about tied for the lead in turnout so far, with both having cast more than 67,000 votes, or almost 19% of total ballots cast each.

Voters ages 18 to 24 have voted the least, with 10,796 ballots or around 3% of the total ballots cast.

As of Monday night, early vote turnout was highest in wards typically known for high voter turnout: the 19th Ward on the Far Southwest Side, the 41st Ward on the Northwest Side and the 47th Ward on the North Side.

But among the most active voting precincts is the Cook County Jail. The sprawling facility at 2700 S. California Ave. in the Little Village neighborhood became the first jail in the country to operate as a precinct with in-person voting in March 2020, according to the Cook County sheriff’s office. Inmate voting soared following the addition.

Oriole Park election judge John Syron said his precinct started the day with fewer election judges than it should have, but the day also got off to a slow start with voters. That could have been because many people voted early, or because students are on spring break, he said. In the past, some parents dropped their kids off at school, then voted in the same place.

Another precinct in the same school also started the day short-staffed and opened late partly because only one election judge arrived in the morning, election judge Norm Phoenix said. A family of three was waiting for voting to open, he said.

By noon, more judges had arrived.

Chicago Tribune’s Stacey Wescott, Claire Malon, Shanzeh Ahmad, Jake Sheridan, John Chase, Kinsey Crowley, A.D. Quig, Kori Rumore, Gregory Pratt and Alice Yin contributed.