1 week Ago
With a few minor changes and no recount or other challenges, the Tulsa County Election Board certified final returns under its jurisdiction late Friday and sent them on to the state board for final action on Tuesday. This was in contrast to the Aug. 27 elections, when a manual recount of the first round of the Tulsa mayoral election caused considerable tension but no material changes to the results.
After sifting through 1,669 provisional ballots (and accepting 539) on Friday, the election board made small changes to a few races and brought the final vote total for Tulsa County to 256,947, including 212,908 in person on Election Day. Those were not all-time highs but officials still considered turnout relatively heavy. Lines were sometimes long and polling places ran out of "I voted" stickers.
"Election Day 2024 went off without any major incidents or security issues thanks to our seasoned workers and the cooperation of law enforcement across Tulsa County," Ronni Pierce of the Tulsa County Election Board said in an email. "Most of the comments we heard from the voters dealt with long lines and electioneering. So we responded by sending out additional poll workers to the larger precincts.
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Next week, the board begins getting ready for Jan. 14 special elections and local propositions. State and local election officials praised the record vote totals statewide, but in fact the percentages of registered voters and potential voters casting ballots was lower than four years ago.
For Tulsa County, the presidential total vote count was about 9,500 less than four years ago, and the Election Day total was about 500 less than eight years ago. As is usually the case, voting further down the ballot dropped, in some cases sharply. Statewide, about 27,000 fewer people voted for corporation commissioner than voted for president.
About 70,000 fewer voted on State Question 834, which changed a word in the state constitution regarding voter eligibility, and more than 100,000 fewer voted on a SQ 833, which had to do with special taxing districts. Between 120,000 and 125,000 fewer voted on the three Oklahoma Supreme Court retention items that were the subject of a heavy campaign for and against. Almost 64% of the 402,547 Tulsa County residents registered to vote did so.
That's less than one 1 point lower than the statewide rate. More than 1,100 provisional and about 800 mail ballots submitted were rejected by the county election board and are not included in the vote totals. The Tulsa World is where your story lives.
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