We come to the end of the early voting period for this weird and not really wanted May special election – okay, not wanted for HCAD, the SD15 special was fine and normal. All along we’ve tried to guess at what turnout might be like, and that has included whether the usual pattern for the early voting period would apply, with the last two days being the busiest culminating in the biggest day of them all. I’m pleased to say that is what happened here, as 6,429 people showed up to vote, more than double from Monday and by far the largest single day total. Add in 160 more mail ballots, and we ended the nine day EV period with 33,652 total votes cast.
The final early voting report is here. It is what it is, and unless we do something like this again I don’t know how to evaluate it. We could end up with 50K total votes, we could end up with 100K, which might barely get us to four percent total turnout. We may yet wind up being one of the higher-performing counties, because I daresay we’re far from alone in being clueless about these elections. At least from here on out they’ll be in November. Did you vote early?
UPDATE: The Houston Landing covers the end of early voting and notes that the last Harris County election in May was in 2022, a Constitutional amendment election that I completely forgot about and overlooked in the harrisvotes.com archives. It had 4.76% turnout, which still put it squarely in the previously discussed range.