The voter turnout for Tuesday’s General Election wasn’t a surprise to Escambia County Probate Judge Doug Agerton.

For the county, a total of 12,233 ballots were cast, according to unofficial numbers. The ballots will be finalized soon.

Agerton said with an election like this, it’s expected to have a higher turnout for the General Election.

“The turn out’s good,” Agerton said. “It’s like it should be for an election like this. We’ve had so many in the primaries where we didn’t have our numbers that weren’t good at all, and the people are surprised.”

Agerton said as an example, a polling place had 2,300 in a box in Brewton.

“At 1:30 p.m., we were at 1,400,” he said. “We had some good numbers. Everything went relatively smoothly for the election.”

With anything, there could be some hiccups.

Agerton said some ballots swelled a bit because of the rain and humidity, but all ballots were counted.

“We had one machine that went down for an hour,” he said. “We ran those through. Overall, we didn’t have any bad mess ups and everything went real well.”

Agerton said a lot of first-time voters turned out for the election. Numbers weren’t available as of press time Tuesday.

“When I would go by the polling places, they’d say we had 25 first-time voters,” he said as an example. “We had a lot of first-time voters, younger, younger first time voters. Some of my poll workers that have been working for years hadn’t seen them in years.”

When asked what he thought brought the voters out, Agerton said it was probably what’s going on in society right now.

“The voters are thinking they want to do their part, and that’s why we had a good result like we have,” he said. “People are more interested in voting and going to the polls today than they have in a long time.”