We had some fantastic diaries yesterday talking about Texas and early voting — so here’s what we have for an update.
First, day one was awesome across the board. In 2008 and 2012, day 1 early voting accounted for about 250-270k votes. This year? Almost 400,000!
Beyond that, there’s some great other information. Texas Monthly has the details — but on day 1, 54% of voters were women, and based on one analysis as many of the voters had voted in the Dem primary as GOP (which is amazing, since the GOP primary had twice the turnout). Based on turnout, Fort Bend county extended early voting hours for Oct 27 and 28, heading into the weekend — and estimated a 50% total early voting turnout in the most diverse county in the state. Of course, not everything was wonderful. There were reports in Harris County of poll workers requiring voter IDs and not providing the court-ordered options...and lines. Tons of lines, up to 3 hours long. Yesterday, things seemed to go better — and people certainly weren’t willing to give up the vote! In Harris county (central Houston), 67,471 people voted Monday. On Tuesday — 73,542.
Let’s take a look at the other big counties (15 of 254, but accounting for 9.7 million of the estimated 14-15 million registered voters in the state (the last number I could find from the SoS website was for the May primary, and I KNOW we’ve been registering voters since then!) — all the SoS website reports for early voting. Turning Texas is a matter of turning out voters: in 2014, 74% of eligible voters were registered, but only 33.7% of them came out to vote. In 2012, the numbers were better, but still not great — still 74% of eligible were registered, but at least 58% of THEM came out to vote, making almost 44% of the voting age population. If we can get that number up to national average...which was 62% in 2008 and 57% in 2012 then we’re talking about half again as many votes — from 8M to 12M. (ish).
Ok, here’s what we have for CHARTS and data: this includes just in-person votes. Day 1 we had 393,805 in-person voters...day 2, we beat it and came in with 401,222! Remember, the running average for daily totals was between 230k-240k in 2008, and 250k-280k in 2012.
|
2008 |
2012 |
2016 |
Early Voting - day 2
Harris (houston) |
43,411 |
51,578 |
73,542 |
Dallas |
35,473 |
34,265 |
53,657 |
Tarrant (Ft Worth) |
32,001 |
33,607 |
44,950 |
Bexar (San Antonio) |
31,413 |
32,784 |
38,063 |
Travis (Austin) |
25,171 |
16,387 |
38,079 |
Collin (plano) |
15,356 |
18,063 |
30,664 |
Denton |
11,550 |
13,742 |
19,320 |
El paso |
17,877 |
8,974 |
16,117 |
Fort bend (SW houston) |
11,286 |
13,279 |
18,285 |
hidalgo |
7,908 |
11,441 |
15,881 |
montgomery (N houston) |
6,756 |
10,118 |
12,557 |
williamson (Austin/round rock) |
8,291 |
9,075 |
16,713 |
galveston |
6,251 |
7,295 |
10,082 |
nueces (corpus christi) |
4,762 |
5,124 |
6,253 |
cameron |
3,647 |
4,391 |
6,539 |
www.mystatesman.com/…
**Updated 2016 EV numbers for all 15 counties! www.sos.state.tx.us/...