With the 2023 Chicago mayoral runoff election just three days away, both former CPS CEO Paul Vallas and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson are making their final efforts to court voters in what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.
Though winning over voters who preferred one of the seven other candidates in the first round is paramount to a runoff victory, both candidates are also looking to drive more voters to the polls in an effort to improve on low turnout in the first round of the election.
For Chicago's municipal general elections on Feb. 28, 566,973 ballots were cast overall, making up 35.85% of the city's 1,581,564 registered voters.
Well over 2,000 voters also filled out a ballot while leaving the mayor's race blank, leaving a total of 564,524 ballots cast in the first round of the mayoral election, according to the Chicago Board of Elections.
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As of Friday night, 195,061 ballots have been submitted for the runoff elections so far, which also include aldermanic runoff elections in 14 of Chicago's 50 wards.
Of those, 129,219 votes were cast via early voting, 65,842 mail-in ballots have been returned.
The city's first-round turnout marked a slight increase from a 35.2% turnout in 2019. Turnout for the runoff election decreased from the first round in 2019, with 32.89% of registered voters casting ballots in the April runoffs.
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Turnout was higher in the runoff election four years prior, when incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel faced then-Cook County Commissioner Chuy García.
Despite just a 33.65% first-round turnout in 2015, there was a significant jump in turnout for the runoff election, with nearly 41% of registered voters casting ballots.
This year's 195,061 ballots cast three days out from the runoff elections marks a significant increase from the totals in both 2015 and 2019, according to the Chicago Board of Elections.
Three days out from the 2019 runoff elections, only 107,904 ballots had been cast. During the same time ahead of the 2015 runoff elections, 130,186 Chicagoans had cast their ballot.
While the higher early voting numbers are encouraging for a potentially larger turnout in the runoff, record early voting and mail-in turnout in February's general election did not ultimately translate to a much higher overall turnout.
With the increased prevalence of mail-in and early voting in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, February's turnout data suggests many voters who had previously cast their ballot on Election Day had opted to do so earlier.
In the first round of this year's mayoral election, Paul Vallas received 185,743 votes, good for 32.9% of the total electorate. Brandon Johnson received 122,093 votes, making up 21.63% of the overall vote.
