DETROIT, Mich. — Detroit election officials expect somewhere between 40% and 45% of the city’s registered voters to take part in the Nov. 3 general election, a pace they say looks a lot like the 2018 midterm.
City Clerk Janice Winfrey said Thursday that 105,000 to 125,000 people should vote at precincts on Election Day. Detroit has roughly 532,000 registered voters.
That forecast would be a big jump from last year’s mayoral race, when only 22% of voters took part, and from the roughly 34% who turned out in the 2022 midterm.
Daniel Baxter, the elections department’s chief of operations, said the estimate rests on a decade of city turnout numbers, along with what is driving interest at the local, state and national levels.
Early voting opened Oct. 24 with a record day of more than 2,300 Detroiters at the polls. The city expects 25,000 to 30,000 early votes in all. Of the more than 106,000 absentee ballots issued, about 60,000 have come back.
Officials said 4,000 poll workers are trained and voting equipment has been tested. Anyone with an unreturned absentee ballot is being urged to sign the envelope and bring it to one of the city’s drop boxes or early voting sites.
Detroit has eight early voting centers. Two of them, at 2978 W. Grand Blvd. and at 2 Woodward Ave., Suite 106, will still be taking voters on Monday, Nov. 2, the final day of early voting. On Election Day, precincts open at 7 a.m. and close at 8 p.m., and riders can take DDOT and SMART buses to vote at no charge.
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