Only 22.49 percent of eligible voters took part in Tuesday’s municipal elections in Allen County, which was a record-low turnout.

Turnout for municipal elections has dropped off in three straight elections, falling to what was then a historic low of 26.2 percent in 2011, when only 49,216 of 187,808 registered voters cast ballots.

This year, only 42,790 of 190,255 eligible voters went to the polls on a warm, sunny day.

Low turnout "is what it is; the numbers don’t lie," Election Board Chairman Thomas Hardin said.

Hardin noted that only three municipalities in the county – Fort Wayne, Grabill and Woodburn – conducted elections this year, compared with four in 2011. In either case, Fort Wayne accounts for the lion’s share of ballots.

Hardin said election officials saw only "run of the mill" problems Tuesday, such as voters showing up at the wrong precincts.

The first-time use of electronic Poll Pads at voting sites quickly revealed where stray voters should have been, he said.

Poll Pads appeared to speed the voter sign-in process. Rather than having to flip through paper books to find voters’ names and addresses and check them against their ID cards, election workers swiped the cards on bar code-reading ­iPads and had people sign the screens as if they were paying for a retail purchase with a credit card.

"Very user-friendly. We’ve had lots of good, positive feedback," Hardin said.

The entire voting system "is working good," county elections Director Beth Dlug said an hour before polls closed at 6 p.m.

Also for the first time, voters this fall could cast ballots early at four branches of the Allen County Public Library during the last four days of October. More than 4,300 people did so, with 1,651 of them voting at the Georgetown library, according to Dlug.

Additionally, 2,672 people voted early during October and on Monday at the Rousseau Centre. And more than 2,400 had sought to vote by mail.

Yet despite technological advances and the increase in voting times and places, turnout keeps declining.

"We’ve got to have some sense of civic duty, we’ve got to have more political party activity" to attract voters, Hardin said. "Who knows what the answer is. More education. Maybe the newspaper or television needs to do more, more, more to get people out."

bfrancisco@jg.net