Candidates share visions for Juneau in virtual forum<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\nWhile candidates were excited to run, most are equally excited to know the results of this year’s elections.<\/p>\n
Voting centers and ballot boxes closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday, and ballots needed to be postmarked no later than Oct. 6, and unofficial results are expected Friday, according to the city. Further work will then be done to count mailed ballots, and a second round of unofficial results will be available on Oct. 16, according to the city.<\/p>\n
“I’m excited for it to be over and finding out what happens,” Woll said in a phone interview. “I think Friday will be… I’ll definitely have some anticipation on Friday. I think my team ran the best possible campaign we could, but we’ll see what the voters think.”<\/p>\n
Many are looking forward to taking some time off from the campaign, like Solomon-Gross, who said he looked forward to getting some time away from his phone together with his wife.<\/p>\n
His District 1 competitor is also looking forward to post-campaign life.<\/p>\n
“I’ll be getting in touch with the volunteers and then taking the dogs on the walks they deserve,” Hughes-Skandijs said.<\/p>\n
All candidates voiced their belief in the importance of an active electorate. Turnout numbers were not available at 5 p.m. Tuesday, but many voters cast ballots ahead of election day, according to city data.<\/p>\n
As of late last week, about 23% of registered Juneau voters cast ballots. That’s over 70% of the total turnout for last year’s municipal election, which saw 31.4% of voters cast ballots. A surge of election day drop-offs could lead the by-mail election past that total.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t as important to me as a younger kid and as I get older, it got more important,” Shoemake said in a phone interview. “If you don’t elect the right people you don’t get the right laws and everything changes, and it’s like, what happened?”<\/p>\n
• Contact reporter Michael S. Lockett at (757) 621-1197 or mlockett@juneauempire.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With voting closed, the waiting begins. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":534,"featured_media":64105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":9,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[237,75],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-64104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home","category-news","tag-election","tag-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64104"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=64104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}