First off, Biden won the machine balloting in Jay, by a large margin. Same with Essex County. So far, we are unified with the national consensus.

A bigger story may be mail-in balloting. The Board of Elections sent 2875 applications and received 1800 requests for absentee ballots. It’s a huge job to manually count each one, so we won’t have official results for weeks. It will be very interesting to compare the final turnout for this primary with previous ones. It’s on track to be high, perhaps a record.

School Board elections were exclusively by mail, and preliminary results indicate a 100% higher turnout!

Three JDC members assisted the Board of Elections as techs and inspectors. We also deployed many “Vote Today” signs around town. The combined districts had 66 in-person voters. Preliminary info indicates that’s more than other comparably-sized towns.

So…overall, a good night for democracy!