Turnout for Tuesday's election was about 28% — something county solicitor Wil White said was significantly higher than what the county expected.

In fact, it was almost double the lower end of Butler County's expectations of 15% to 20% voter turnout. White attributed the high rate to “some interesting local races.”

“Hotly contested school board races, three different magisterial district (judge) races and a local (common pleas) judicial race always bring people out,” White said. “Add to that the weather, and the CDC and the commonwealth relaxing COVID restrictions, with masking and such ... people were a little more comfortable getting out and going to the polls.”

Speaking of going to the polls, the county saw a lower rate of mail-in voting than it had during the November general election. The county Bureau of Elections issued roughly 10,000 mail-in ballots — including no-excuse mail-in, absentee, emergency and military ballots — and received about 7,700.

“It's comparable to the June 2020 primary,” White said of the mail-in turnout. “I think we assumed, given the incredibly high number of mail-in and absentee ballots for the November general election, that practice might carry over, but it didn't. Those numbers are fairly in line with what we saw last year” during the primary.

The county decided to test a new system of publishing election returns Tuesday, shifting from its web-based HTML platform to one of publishing PDF files of returns on the website.White explained that was due to residents requesting more information to be printed along with the returns, but the trial run wasn't exactly a smashing success.“We were trying a new reporting format because were trying to be more consumer-friendly by reporting more information, but there's going to have to be some medium,” White said.An issue White identified with the PDF-based system is the separation along party lines of questions and candidates presented to both parties and nonpartisans, such as the ballot questions.Rather than combining the total votes cast for the proposed constitutional amendments, he noted, the report shows the Republican totals for those ballot questions on one page, with Democratic totals more than a hundred pages later and nonpartisan votes even further down the file.“I think that's going to have to be tweaked again,” White said.

White said the county was able to reach out to most, if not all, voters who had cast a vote for Mars Area School Board candidate Lee Ann Riner on a Democratic mail-in ballot — although she ran only as a Republican — to offer a chance to re-cast their vote.When polls opened Tuesday, according to White, about six election workers opened mail-in ballots to determine if a voter needed to be presented with a chance to spoil their mail-in vote and cast another ballot. He said all but about a dozen provided email addresses, and the county reached out to them via email.About 25 voters took advantage of the chance to cast another vote without the error on the ballot, an equal number said they weren't too interested in a re-cast, and a handful of voters expressed frustration or were upset because they couldn't rectify their ballots because they were out of town or something similar.“Most people who called in just wanted to make sure that the remainder of their ballot was still good,” White said. “We assured them that, yes, just because of that their ballot was not going to be invalidated.”For in-person voters, election workers spent Monday trying to prevent any potential similar error from occurring at the polls.“We pulled every single Democratic paper ballot for those precincts and the staff literally sat down and, with a white mailing label, covered up that individual's name on the Democratic ballot, so nobody could go to the polls Tuesday and vote for that person,” White said.That white sticker was one of the county's ways of informing voters of the error, along with a card handed to Democratic voters when they received their ballot and a flier in the polling places.It was an error, and White said the county shouldn't make those — “We strive to be perfect and we should be, but there's a human element involved,” he said — but the Mars Area error was relatively minor.“It could have been worse. There were one or two counties in Pennsylvania that had errors on their ballots of omission,” White said. “If I have an error, which I'd rather not, I'd rather have one of inclusion, rather than omission.”White added he was grateful to the county election workers for their hard work, and thankful to the voters for being patient, especially given director of elections Aaron Sheasley's unavailability due to unavoidable personal circumstances. White said he was glad with how Tuesday's election turned out. “Given the things that could have happened and how this could've turned into a major trainwreck, I was pleasantly surprised with how things went and how smooth things were,” White said.