LEE COUNTY, Fla (WINK) – Thousands of voters in Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties cast ballots early ahead of Tuesday’s election.<\/p>\n
WINK News stopped by early voting sites in Collier County and Lee County on Saturday afternoon. Voters in Collier County said early voting saved them time, while dozens of people stood in line at the Lee County election center to cast their ballots.<\/p>\n
Election officials reported 108,602 early voters in Lee County, 67,301 in Collier County and 40,484 in Charlotte County. In Collier County, officials said turnout could reach about 60%.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, we’re looking at maybe hitting around a 60% turnout in Collier County,\u201d Melissa Blazier, Collier County supervisor of elections, said. \u201cI would love to see it go higher than that. We’ve got important races and issues on the ballot this year, and everyone should take advantage of that and get out and vote.\u201d<\/p>\n
Voters WINK News spoke with in Collier County said they did not want to take the opportunity for granted. They said every vote could make a difference and that everyone had a right to support what they believed was right.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people seem to think that one vote isn’t going to make much of a difference, but it really does,\u201d Kelly Duncan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether I agree with you or I don’t agree with you, we all have a right to pursue what we think is right,\u201d Gabby Sprowels said.<\/p>\n
Dan Hennessey said he had voted for 20 years and believed it was important for people to make their voices heard. He said his parents made voting a priority in his family.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo my parents were very instrumental in making voting a priority, but it was something I never missed, and I saw the value of it,\u201d Hennessey said.<\/p>\n
With early voting over, election officials and volunteers were preparing for Tuesday. They said voters with mail-in ballots could drop them off beginning Monday and had to return them by 7 p.m. on Election Day, and they urged voters to know their precinct location, fill out a sample ballot and do their homework before heading to the polls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LEE COUNTY, Fla (WINK) – Thousands of voters in Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties cast ballots early ahead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,4250,853,7353,5926,165542,173021,173023,173020,325,356,173022,169695,1521,38979],"class_list":["post-444006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-charlotte","tag-charlotte-county","tag-collier","tag-collier-county","tag-county-supervisor","tag-dan-hennessey","tag-gabby-sprowels","tag-kelly-duncan","tag-lee","tag-lee-county","tag-lee-county-election-center","tag-melissa-blazier","tag-southwest-florida","tag-wink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}