On a rainy, chilly November day, 66% of Seward County’s registered voters turned out to cast their ballots in the 2026 midterm elections.
That is a bit higher than the state’s turnout of 59.4%.
Seward County Clerk and Election Commissioner Brandy Johnson said 7,676 voters cast their ballots, with more than 1,300 of those submitted during early voting.
As listed on the Nebraska Secretary of State’s website, as of Nov. 1, Seward County had 11,605 registered voters. That number includes 7,243 Republicans, 2,243 Nonpartisans, 1,923 Democrats, 149 Libertarians, 42 Legal Marijuana Now, and 1 Nebraska Working People voters.
“We had an amazing turnout so that is awesome,” Johnson said. “People really seem to be taking a stand and making sure their voice is heard.”
In the 2022 midterm elections, Seward County saw 6,868 people vote. This year’s turnout had 808 more ballots completed, an 11.7% increase. Turnout is always lower for midterm elections. In the 2024 presidential elections, 9,374 Seward County voters showed up.
“I am really, really pleased with how election day went,” Johnson said.
While there were instances involving petition circulators and some electioneering, too, near the polls during May’s primary elections, Johnson said no issues were reported during the general election.
A few precincts had lines during some peak voting hours – one that required a 30-minute wait in Seward – but Johnson said despite some glitches in the state system for uploading results and the fact that ballots had as many as three pages to feed through the counting equipment, reporting results ran smoothly.
“I cannot say enough great things about our poll workers,” Johnson said. “It is a thankless job.”
But they keep coming back to work those 13-plus-hour days and Johnson said she thinks the perspective they have on the day reflects the work they have done and their knowledge of how it all works.
“You may not realize that that piece of paper has been in the works all year,” she said of the ballots.
This election, her office coordinated 73 different versions of the ballot to facilitate the overlapping districts and boundaries for schools, NRDs, cities, villages and the like that each residence has.
All precincts had turned in ballots by 9 p.m. after accounting for each of the ballots they were issued. Cordova is usually the last to arrive because of its distance from Seward.
“We know exactly how many ballots we give them,” Johnson said.
When a precinct turns ballots in, the number on which people have voted and the number of unused ballots has to add up.
Then it was just a matter of counting them.
“You can only go as fast as you can run them through the machine,” she said.
Prior to election day, the clerk’s office staff participated in required mock election counting exercises with the state, one that the office schedules at their convenience and the other a “stress test” in which multiple counties are testing the state’s uploading software at the same time.
But she was pleased that her office did not experience so much as a paper jam on election night.
“We tried to do as much as we can as quickly as we can,” she said. “I knew that people were waiting and it was a lot of ballots.”
Of the 7,676 ballots returned, 98 were flagged as provisional ballots and Johnson’s team is still working through those. Most she said, are instances in which people have moved or changed their names and thought they had updated their voting registration.
Some will be eligible to be counted.
“If nothing else, they will be getting registered,” she said.
The Beaver Crossing voting precinct has been selected by the secretary of state’s office to participate in its post-election sampling of 10% of the state’s precincts, and Johnson is now recruiting two Democrats and two Republicans to help hand count ballots as part of that audit.
The auditors will be assigned two races on the ballots to count and a third race can be assigned by the county election commissioner. Johnson said she has the option to allow the auditors to select which local race will be counted to further the transparency in the test.
The final step in making the election results official is the county’s canvassing meeting which had been set for Nov. 13, but may have to be moved into the following week due to the Veteran’s Day holiday on Nov. 11 and the number of provisional ballots being reviewed.
