Voter turnout in Wilkes County for the 2026 midterm elections is off to a strong start, with 1,583 ballots cast in the first two days (Thursday and Friday) of early voting last week.
That's about 17% more than the 1,350 people who cast ballots in the first two days of early voting in 2022, and about 29% more than 1,226 ballots cast in the same period in 2018.
The number of ballots cast statewide in early voting by Sunday was more than a 37% increase over the total by then in the 2022 midterms. Political observers said early results indicated a possible record turnout in North Carolina this election.
Wilkes has three early voting sites this year, as it did in the 2022 and 2018 midterm races.
Current early voting sites are the commissioners meeting room on the first floor of the County Office Building on North Street in Wilkesboro; Champion Fire Station on Champion-Mount Pleasant Road in the Mount Pleasant community; and Pleasant Hill Fire Station on Austin-Traphill Road in the Pleasant Hill community.
Early voting sites in 2022 were the County Office Building, Millers Creek Fire Station and Edwin McGee Natural Resource Center on Fairplains Road, North Wilkesboro. A Wilkes elections official said in 2022 that the elections board wanted but couldn’t find enough people to staff an early voting site in the Pleasant Hill Fire Station or another far eastern Wilkes site.
In 2018, early voting sites were the County Office Building and the Pleasant Hill and Millers Creek fire stations.
When 522 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting in Wilkes in 2014, with five early voting sites, Wilkes election officials called it a strong turnout.
Turnouts in Wilkes on the first day of early voting in subsequent midterm elections were 642 in 2018, 709 in 2022 and 839 in 2026.
Early voting for the 2026 election is from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on weekdays through Oct. 30 and from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Oct. 31, which is the last day and only Saturday with early voting. People not registered to vote may register in the county in which they live and immediately vote at the same site during early voting.
Wilkes had 45,451 registered voters by the end of the second day of early voting (Friday), up 3% from 44,134 in the same period in 2022. Wilkes voter registration increased 2.46% from 2018-2022.
Ballots cast by the end of the day Friday represented 3.4% of registered voters then. About 20% of the county’s registered voters cast ballots in early voting in both the 2022 and 2018 midterm elections,
As of Friday, Republicans accounted for 55.4% of Wilkes County’s 45,451 registered voters; Democrats, 12.8%; unaffiliated, 31.3%; and Libertarian, .40%.
In addition, 39,392 of the county’s registered voters were self-identified as White, 1,659 as Black, 1,239 as Hispanic, 156 as Asian, 92 as multi-racial, 47 as Native American/Alaska native, 1,112 as other and 3,083 as undesignated.
The latest political party registration totals in Wilkes indicate a continuation of trends in place for several years.
The number of registered Republicans in Wilkes grew from 23,947 just before the early voting period in 2022 to 25,201 on Friday, a 5.2% increase. GOP registration rose by 8% from just before the early voting period in 2018 to the same period in 2022, and by 4% from 2014-2018.
Democratic registration in Wilkes dropped by 20%, from 7,318 to 5,840 in the period cited above from 2022-2026. It declined by 25% from 2018-2022, and by 12% from 2014-2018.
Unaffiliated registration grew from 12,659 in 2022 to 14,216 as of Friday, a 12.3% increase. It rose by 15% from 2018-2022 and by 21.6% from 2014-2018.
From 2022-2026, Libertarian Party registration dropped from 208 to 184 and Green Party registration grew from two to 11.
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