Last Updated: 7:08 p.m.
The Palm Coast City Council’s referendum, asking residents to loosen the city’s debt and leasing authority, was going down to defeat in a decisive blow to a council already decimated by defeats and term limits.
Flagler County On Brink of Record Turnout as Anxiety-Ridden Election Goes from Anticipation to Results
Flagler County was poised to break its modern-memory election-turnout of 82 percent as an anxiety-ridden pair of election weeks was yielding to vote-counting, with an 82.5 percent unofficial turnout already recorded about an hour before the polls closed, and one last batch of mail-in ballots yet to be included.
The 2000, 2004 and 2008 elections all exceeded 80 percent turnout in Flagler, besting the state by several percentage points, but the highest recorded turnout was in 2004. The 2012 and 2016 turnout rates fell into the low seventies before the 2020 Biden-Trump race drew out 78.6 percent of voters.
Significantly, there are now nearly 100,000 registered voters in Flagler County. Even in 2008, the year Obama was elected to his first term–and Democrats were in the majority in Flagler County–there were just 60,000. Today, Republicans have a 24,000-voter advantage over Democrats and have dominated voting in early voting and election day voting, and stayed ahead by a few votes in mail-in voting. Overall, Republicans have outrun Democrats by 2-to-1 in ballots cast.
With a 65 percent turnout already recorded by the time Election day began, there was some question whether there would still be a large enough group of voters to push the numbers past the record today. But some 15,000 voters went to their precincts to vote–with many actually going to one of the early voting sites, only to be redirected to their correct precincts. In 2020, the year of Covid, only 11,800 voters cast a ballot in person on Election day, with 28,537 voting early, compared to 42,900 voting early this year. Some 22,400 ballots were cast by mail this year, compared to 31,881 in 2020.
Security has not been an issue. Neither Supervisor of Elections Kaity Lenhart nor Sheriff Staly reported serious issues during the two weeks of early voting or today. Both spoke of notable civility between various camps or individual candidates. There were some allegations of vandalized or stolen signs, but those happen at every election.
“My personal opinion is from driving around the county and looking at different locations is that everything is going smooth and peaceful in Flagler County,” Staly said in midafternoon today. “Hopefully it stays that way regardless of the outcome, whenever we know that, whether it’s tonight or a week from now.”
The Sheriff’s Office’s Homeland Security Section is monitoring the local situation and keeping an eye on the state and the national situation. “At this time the only thing we’ve done is remind our patrols that voting is going on today, to pay extra attention to the voting sites but not give the appearance that we’re trying to suppress any voting,” the aim being ensuring safety.
Trump fans trundled around town in trucks and Teslas flying huge Trump-Vance flags. The Harris camp held big rallies, one along State Road 100 near Target, the other on Palm Coast Parkway and Old Kings Road, both at midday, to honking cars–or to loud and at times gross insults. The rally on State Road 100 included an opponent who’d weaved himself amid the Harris-loving crowd with signs calling her supporters “useful idiots” and other invectives, but he was never bothered or stopped from peddling his messages, if with the ironic protection of the Harris fans’ wall.
“I think Flagler County has a pretty good reputation overall for keeping elections peaceful so everybody can voice their constitutional rights, and we will ensure that occurs. But we have no indications of any issues in Flagler County.”
Even Ray Stevens and Andrew Werner, the two candidates for the Palm Coast City Council’s District 3 seat, made up, after what had been a rather tense early voting period, with both often campaigning a few feet apart from each other at the public library site.
“I didn’t usually have conversation with him, but just me and him here, so we conversed,” Stevens said in late afternoon today. He’d campaigned at the library every day since early voting began. He recalled what he told Werner: “If you win, you’re stuck with it, man, you know, because you got a world of problems coming up. And I said, if you win, fine, I’m going to Georgia. And he says, ‘Well, you know, if you win, anything I could do to help you. Thanks. So anyhow, we had some conversation. So we’re not at each other’s throats anymore.” Stevens has a property in Georgia where he intends to go to decompress after the election.
You couldn’t exactly see the pins and needles at the library site, where voting had slowed to a crawl by late afternoon, but you could feel them.
