Longer than normal waiting time was the only challenge experienced by voters in Warren County last week, despite a huge turnout for the hotly contested presidential election.

“Everything went very smooth. Everybody was very nice, very polite, very patient,” said County Clerk Denise Stotler, the county’s chief election official. She said extra sanitizing and social distancing steps for COVID-19 didn’t hamper the elections.

Like many parts of the country, voters in some areas of Warren County did have to contend with unusually long wait times if they came in the morning, with lines extending into the parking lot of polling places. By the lunch hour, that wait had diminished significantly.

“I’ve heard an hour-and-a-half wait time, but that was the bigger (voting precincts) like South Elkhorn,” Stotler commented, saying a more common wait time was 10-15 minutes.

The Record asked readers on Facebook what their voting experience had been. Several replied that they waited about half an hour to vote, or that they saw a long line in the morning and chose to return later and didn’t have a wait. Others said they didn’t have any wait, or chose to vote early.

More than 18,400 voters cast ballots in Warren County last Tuesday, about 74 percent of registered voters here. That’s a small jump from the 2016 presidential election, which had 67 percent voter turnout.

Compared to a non-presidential election, that 74 percent is almost double or even triple the number of voters that election officials would expect to see.

Stotler said the only other issue that some people experienced is the same issue her office deals with every election: People come to vote without registering first, or without changing their registration address after moving. Because the voter registration deadline is several weeks before each election, those people couldn’t vote. Stotler said most were understanding when this was explained to them.

“And then we ended up getting about 150 (voter) registrations the very next day,” Stotler quipped.

The high number of mail-in and absentee ballots this year were also handled well, Stotler said, although a few straggler ballots that arrived days late in the mail were not able to be counted.

After the election, one issue did take the clerk’s office by surprise. Following the circulation of false rumors on social media that Sharpie markers could ruin ballots, Stotler said she received a lot of concerned phone calls.

“There is not a problem with using them,” Stotler said. “It was nonstop for two days about these markers. ... I assured them, your vote counted. We’ve been using markers since I’ve been here, and had no issues.”