More people voted in Richmond and Columbia counties than in the last midterm election, but a smaller share of their registered electorates participated, according to preliminary 2026 returns and local election officials.
That distinction matters. A falling turnout rate does not necessarily mean fewer ballots. It can mean the voter rolls grew faster than participation did.
The clearest comparison is in Columbia County. Its unofficial Nov. 3 results list 67,975 ballots cast and 115,295 registered voters. That works out to 58.96% turnout.
The county’s official 2022 general-election report recorded 64,709 ballots among 103,272 registered voters, or 62.66%.
The comparison produces two different, equally important measures: Columbia County counted 3,266 more ballots, an increase of about 5%, while its registered-voter denominator grew by 12,023, or about 11.6%. Its turnout rate fell by 3.70 percentage points.
Those are countywide figures. They do not establish which neighborhoods or groups participated less, or why an individual voter stayed home.
Richmond’s count and rate also tell different stories
Richmond County’s state results dashboard lists 67,004 ballots and 134,116 registered voters, putting participation at about 50%.
Travis Doss, executive director of the Richmond County Board of Elections, told WRDW/WAGT that more people voted than in 2022, but the active voter rolls had grown by roughly 10,000. He put the previous midterm’s turnout at a little over 51%.
Doss also reported a change in how people voted: more than 38,000 voted early in person this year, compared with about 31,000 in 2022. Those figures describe the timing and method of participation; they do not, by themselves, establish an increase in the final turnout rate.
The county dashboards label their denominators “Registered Voters.” In WRDW/WAGT’s report, local election officials described the turnout comparison in terms of active registered voters. Neither measure should be read as the share of every adult resident who voted.
The numbers are not final
Both 2026 dashboards remained marked unofficial in the returns reviewed for this story. Columbia’s page showed all 40 precincts at election-night completion, with provisional ballots not reported. Richmond’s showed election-night completion for all 65 precincts. Election-night completion is not the same as certification.
The Columbia comparison also pairs a certified 2022 total with a preliminary 2026 count. Any additional accepted ballots can change the current total and percentage.
For now, the records support a narrower conclusion than a story about voter enthusiasm or apathy: more ballots were cast, but participation did not keep pace with the size of the electorate used to calculate turnout.