El Paso records 'decent' voter turnout for 2022 midterm election

El Paso County's voter turnout was better than in other recent midterm years, except for the record-setting 2018 midterm election, the county's election administrator said.

One in three registered voters, or 33%, cast ballots in this election, compared with a 45% turnout in 2018 when Democrat and El Pasoan Beto O'Rourke narrowly lost a bid to unseat incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.

This year's highest-profile race again featured O'Rourke, this time in an unsuccessful run for Texas governor against Republican incumbent Greg Abbott.

The election also included El Paso City Council, congressional, state, county and other offices.

The voter turnout was "decent. We always want to get as many people to the polls as possible," El Paso County Elections Administrator Lisa Wise said Wednesday after a long night with workers tabulating unofficial results until 1:30 a.m. in the morning.

Election 2022:Live El Paso County 2022 Texas midterm election results

More than 165,000 voters out of 506,000 registered voters cast ballots in the general midterm election in El Paso County this year, according to county statistics. By comparison, more than 205,000 people voted in 2018, which is considered an outlier, or abnormally high, year, Wise said. There were 82,500 votes cast in 2014; 92,000 in 2010 and 93,600 in 2006.

The November voter turnout was a giant jump from the 11% turnout in the March primary election.

At the beginning of the early voting period, Wise expected a turnout of about 25% after early voting got off to an unusually slow pace before it increased, she said.

“Election Day (also) started kind of slow," Wise said. "The first hour is usually busy as people go to work and this time it was slow, but it really began picking up around lunchtime and continued into the evening."

In El Paso, voters were not only inundated with repeated, back-to-back TV political ads for races in Texas but also for elections in neighboring New Mexico.

Mail-in ballot rejections, polling site aggression

This year's election went smoothly, although there still were some issues with mail-in ballots being rejected for lacking identification information, Wise said.

The rejections are due to new voting and election regulations in Senate Bill 1 that Abbott signed into law last year. SB 1 requires Texans who vote by mail to include a driver's license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number on the envelope containing their ballot. That number has to match the number provided on the vote-by-mail application submitted earlier.

During the primary, hundreds of El Paso mail-in ballots were returned when voters registered with a Social Security number and sent a ballot with a driver's license number, or vice versa. Other ballots lacked required signatures.

The rejected ballots can be corrected if they are returned on time, Wise said. To help prevent rejections, notices reminding voters to fill in identifier information were distributed. The exact number of rejected mail-in ballots would not be known until the reception deadline Monday.

The Elections Department received two or three complaints in which voters reported possible intimidation at early voting sites, Wise added.

One of the incidents involved a campaign worker for El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego and local conservative political activist Sammy Carrejo.

The confrontation occurred as Carrejo was recording Samaniego on a cellphone video while attempting to question him on Nov. 4 outside a polling place at the Marty Robbins Recreation Center, 11620 Vista Del Sol Drive, according to the video and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office, which was called to the scene by an employee of the Elections Department.

Carrejo alleged that a Samaniego campaign worker using a political sign to block him from filming and knocked his phone out of his hand. The worker in turn accused Carrejo of knocking down her phone. The Sheriff's Office sent both sides on their way and said an investigation would determine if any charges were warranted.

"There were one or two other people who reported that campaigners had gotten a little too aggressive outside polling locations," Wise said.

The Sheriff’s Office was asked to increase patrols near polling places in case there were any more problems, but everything apparently went well and there were no more complaints by Election Day, Wise said.

El Paso City Council runoffs

Election season is not quite over. Three contests for seats on the El Paso City Council are going into a runoff because no candidate received more than 50% of the vote Tuesday, according to final unofficial results.

The runoff election will be Saturday, Dec. 17, with the early voting period starting Nov. 30. The finalists are:

• West Side District 1: Brian Kennedy faces Analisa Cordova Silverstein.

• East Valley District 6: Incumbent city Rep. Claudia Lizette Rodriguez faces Art Fierro.

• South-West District 8: Bettina Olivares faces Chris Canales.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: El Paso records 'decent' voter turnout in 2022 midterm election