TOLEDO, Ohio — The Lucas County Board of Election reported a 61.4% voter turnout rate in Tuesday's election.
According to data from the Secretary of State's office, voter turnout for Lucas County in 2020 was at 67.4%, making it the third lowest in the state of Ohio.
The county is seeing the same trend this year, as surrounding counties are seeing higher percentages.
Sky Beckwith, the Lucas County Democratic Party chairwoman, said more than 160,000 pieces of direct mail and more then 150,000 text messages were sent on behalf of endorsed candidates and issues in Lucas County to get voters out to cast their ballots.
She said party leaders are proud of the work they did in their campaigning efforts for this election.
"We had some really important races that we won including two judicial seats for Amy Stoner and Ken Walz," said Beckwith.
But she is not too pleased with the overall outcome.
"We have some work to do to connect with voters in a way that, that motivates them to get out to vote. I am committed to doing that kind of infrastructure building," said Beckwith.
According to data from the Lucas county board of elections, there is more than 304,000 registered voters in the county, but only around 187,000 people voted.
An issue Beckwith said party leaders are planning to tackle for future elections.
"We want to talk, knock on folks doors and talk to them about issues that are important to them," she continued. "Like I said, not just in presidential election years, we need to make sure we do that all, all of the time."
"Our absentee mail requests were down, we had quite a bit less than we did in 2020 as well," said Monaco. "In addition, we also have almost 5,000 more I believe voters than we did in 2020 registered, so even though the difference is probably about 10,000 votes in the unofficial canvas, it looks like a bigger percentage drop than it was from total votes."
Lucas County Board of Election deputy director Tim Monaco said official results have not come in for this year's election. He also noticed more Republican participation in the county this year.
"Specifically in regards to this election, I can say it looked like Republican turnout had increased at the early vote center. You can see that pretty clearly with our early vote numbers," said Monaco.
In Wood County, voter turnout is at 73.6%, a number its board of elections office director, Terry Burton said isn't shocking.
"Pretty much dead on what we've had the last two presidential cycles," said Burton. "We were within one percent of what we did in 2020, we were within about two or three percent of what we did in 2016."
WTOL 11 reached out to the Lucas County Republican Party for comment, but have not yet heard back.