The Pittsfield community of around 43,000 accounts for over a third of Berkshire County’s total population.
“Out of our 32,834 registered voters, as of right now, we have 20,840 that have voted. We do have some post-election totals that we will add to this next Tuesday. We can't count them until then. Well, actually, we could count them tonight at 5pm, but I'm going home," laughed City Clerk Michele Benjamin. “So, Tuesday we're going to count the rest of those, and then we have to have a board of registrars meeting for any federal write-in ballots- And right now, I have three of them, but that could change next week. They have up until the 15th if they are overseas to mail those back to us.”
The total turnout currently stands at just under 64% — a considerable drop from the last presidential election in 2020 and well below Benjamin’s prediction of at or above 73%.
“We did drop down at least 10% in our percentage totals," she told WAMC. "And the only thing I can attribute that to is, 2020 we were in a COVID year, and I had over 12,000 people come into city hall or vote by mail, and we processed all those internally. We didn't send all those early ballots to the polls, so, there would be no way they could have processed all of them. But we had 12,000 people vote in person in 2020.”
This year, that number dropped to a little over 8,000, a difference of around 4,000.
“We had a lot of people at the polls, but not the numbers we saw in 2020,” said the clerk.
Benjamin reports that Election Day went about as well as it could have gone from the perspective of her office.
“The only thing that slowed them down at the polls were the number of people that were inactive," she said. "And like I said, what keeps them active on the voter rolls is returning their city census in January, February. So that slowed people down. And if you are inactive, you have to provide an ID showing that you still live at the address that you're registered at.”
The clerk says her office rose to the occasion after an exhausting election cycle.
“I'm very happy with our election workers, our staff here," said Benjamin. "I mean, it's a lot of work. Processing almost 21,000 ballots is a lot of work, whether it's in the office or at the polls.”
There was one major difference between the days following the last presidential election and this one.
“Well, we don't hear anything right now about election fraud because of the way the results turned out," laughed the clerk. "I just think you have to trust the people you elected and the election workers and have faith in us. I mean, we work hard, our staff works hard, and we produce the best accurate results that we can.”
2024 also differentiated from 2020 in Pittsfield’s vote split between the Democratic and Republican Parties. While the Democrats won the state in both contests, 2020 saw Joe Biden’s successful campaign bring in over 16,400 Pittsfield votes. Kamala Harris’s failed bid this year brought in only around 14,500. While Donald Trump’s 2020 run secured a little over 5,000 votes, his 2024 campaign attracted over 5,600. In Trump’s first campaign in 2016 – when 71% of city voters went to the polls – fewer than 4,800 Pittsfielders cast ballots in his name.
To the south, Great Barrington town clerk Joshua Risen ran his first presidential election of his career just three months into the job.
“It went pretty smooth," he told WAMC. "It was much busier than I thought it was going to be based on my previous experience with just the one primary election before it. So, it was interesting to see the numbers almost triple in volume.”
Early voting played a major role in Great Barrington’s 2024 election experience.
“Early voting and mail-in voting was basically my whole life for the last month or so and my assistant town clerk Kathy's life," said Risen. "It's a big lift for our office. I think we had 30%, 31%- I'd say 32% of our voters were early votes.”
Despite the bustling polls on Tuesday, the Southern Berkshire community still failed to match turnout from 2020.
“By the end of the day, our grand total across all four precincts was 3,947," said the clerk. "So, what my calculation was is we got about 77.2% of the of the active voters.”
Four years ago, over 4,100 Great Barrington voters cast ballots.
According to the office of Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, final numbers on statewide turnout aren’t expected until November 20th.
