* Click here for the official vote totals book. Illinois State Board of Elections…

Statewide voter turnout for the Nov. 5 election was 70 percent, according to the official vote total certified today by the Illinois State Board of Elections.

The official total showed 5,705,246 of the state’s 8,101,424 registered voters cast ballots in the election, resulting in a statewide voter turnout of 70.42 percent. Turnout was the fourth lowest of the last 48 years.

* I checked with the state board, and these are the presidential election numbers for the past twenty years…

2024: 8,101,424 registered voters, 5,705,246 ballots cast, 70.42% turnout
2020: 8,364,099 registered voters, 6,098,729 ballots cast, 72.92% turnout
2016: 8,029,847 registered, 5,666,118 ballots, 70.56% turnout
2012: 7,520,722 registered, 5,279,752 ballots, 70.2% turnout
2008: 7,789,500 registered, 5,577,509 ballots, 71.60% turnout
2004: 7,499,488 registered, 5,350,493 ballots, 71.34% turnout

Kamala Harris received 409,052 fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020. Part of that could very well be due to this year’s lower voter registration numbers and the lower turnout percentage.

Donald Trump received just 2,188 more statewide votes this year than four years ago.

If you look at 2016, which had very similar overall numbers, Harris received 27,866 fewer votes this year than Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump received 303,064 more votes this year than he got then. One other big difference was that third party presidential candidates received almost 300,000 votes in 2016, compared to just a bit over 40,000 votes this year (and about 115K in 2020).

* “Illinois Presidential Election Turnout Highest to Lowest, 1976-2024″…

* Back to the board’s press release…

Nearly 1 million voters are estimated to have cast their ballots by mail in the 2024 General Election, the highest number ever outside of the 2020 General Election, when pandemic restrictions resulted in more than 2 million ballots being cast by mail. (The vote-by-mail estimate is based on data provided by 101 of the state’s 108 local election authorities and pre-election reports. The full mail voting report, to be submitted to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and containing data from all election authorities, will be published on the SBE website on Dec. 4.)

Nearly 2 million voters cast ballots in person during early voting between Sept. 26 and Nov. 4. That number also was the highest ever outside of 2020, when early voting totaled nearly 2.01 million ballots.

* More numbers…