There have been a few diaries about the surprising early voting turnout in Georgia over in the last few weeks. I believe it was CB8421 that first alerted me to the early voting issue here in GA. What I attempt to do in this diary is to subject the early voting data to some comparison and analysis.
As I think we all know by now, early voting and generally increased African American turnout has the potential to defeat the odious Saxby Chamblis and send Jim Martin, a true progressive, to the Senate. So, like any good political junkie, I got my hands on all the data I could get on the internet and plugged it into a spreadsheet to track all of this on a daily basis. Sadly, the Georgia Secretary of State's office doesn't list the day by day early voting totals in an archive, so all I can get are the current totals. This will be fine from here on out since I can just compare today's totals with the data I recorded from the previous day, but I can't show data from before last Friday, October 17th.
Come see the data after the jump.
If anyone knows an easier way to get this data out of my spreadsheet and put it into a diary, I'm all ears. Also, as I get more data, hopefully I can create some graphs to track this data in a more effective manner.
As for some analysis, you can tell from the spreadsheet that African American turnout is maintaining a position in the mid 30's, which is well above the roughly 25% that they comprised in 2004 and 2006. Better yet 15% of registered African American's have already voted! Those are votes we don't need to worry about turning out on election day. For reference, about 72% of registered African Americans voted in 2004.
Check out the sources below.
Georgia Voter Registration Data (as of October 1st)
Georgia Early Voting Data
I acknowledge that early voting isn't necessarily an accurate predictor of election day turnout. I would argue that it is an accurate predictor of voter enthusiasm. Beyond that, it's simply all we've got beyond polling to predict the outcome on election day. Below are a few problems that I see with early voting in terms of predicting election day outcomes.
- African American voters are more likely to vote early than White voters. African Americans in Georgia are more likely to face problems at the polls or to anticipate facing problems at the polls so they are more likely to try to avoid those problems by locking in their votes early.
- Democrats are more likely to vote early than Republicans. The Obama campaign has made an effort to get people to come out to vote early.
- People in urban areas are more likely to vote early than people in the suburbs or exurbs.
None of the above reasons are exclusive. Indeed, most of them overlap (more African Americans live in urban areas, as do more Democrats, etc.).
In closing, for those of you in Georgia who are registered but haven't voted yet, go vote early. For a list of early voting places listed by county, click here.