Here’s your final daily EV report and your updated tracker spreadsheet. The final tally from Friday was 105,005 in person votes and 2,882 more mail ballots returned. That brings us to 882,580 people showing up at an early vote location, 94,699 returned mail ballots, and 977,279 total early voters. There will no doubt be a couple thousand more mail ballots coming in between now and Tuesday, so the final early vote tally will be a bit higher – surely north of 980,000, though by how much I couldn’t say. To put this in a bit pf perspective, there were 1,088,793 ballots cast in Harris County in the entire 2004 election. We’re at over 90% of tha total after early voting, and there’s still Tuesday to come.
So how many people will vote on Tuesday? I’ll get to that in a second, but let’s remember that there are some 300,000 more registered voters now than there were in 2012. As I’ve shown before, if turnout in Harris County is the same fair-to-middling rate of 61.99% as it was in 2012, we’d have 1,385,276 total votes cast, or about another 400,000 on Tuesday. Let’s look at the Election Day rates from the last three elections to give us some further guidance.
Year Mail Early E-Day Total
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2004 47,619 411,822 629,333 1,088,793
2008 67,612 678,449 442,670 1,188,731
2012 76,085 700,982 427,100 1,204,167
2016 94,699 882,580
Year RVs Mail% Early% E-Day%
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2004 1,876,296 2.54% 21.95% 33.54%
2008 1,892,656 3.57% 35.85% 23.39%
2012 1,942,566 3.92% 36.09% 21.99%
2016 2,219,647 4.27% 39.76%
As noted before, the final number of mail ballots will be higher after the Monday and Tuesday post comes in, but this is good enough for now. Let’s project four possible turnout values for Tuesday based on what we have seen before.
Scenario 1: 23.39% of RVs vote on Tuesday, same as was in 2008. This is another 519,175 voters, for 1,496,454 total, or 67.42% turnout.
Scenario 2: 21.99% of RVs vote on Tuesday, same as was in 2012. This is another 488,100 voters, for 1,465,379 total, or 66.02% turnout.
Scenario 3: 19.48% of RVs vote on Tuesday. This is the difference between EV plus E-Day turnout percentages in 2008 and the EV percentage this year. That’s another 432,237 voters for 1,409,516 total, or 63.50% turnout.
Scenario 4: 18.32% of RVs vote on Tuesday. This is the difference between EV plus E-Day turnout percentages in 20012 and the EV percentage this year. That’s another 406,639 voters for 1,383,918 total, or 62.35% turnout.
Something like #s 2 or 3 seem the most likely, possibly in between the two, but anything could happen. And again, remember that there’s probably a couple thousand more mail ballots on their way to the County Clerk’s office, so all of these would be a tad low anyway. For what it’s worth, the County Clerk is projecting 1.5 million voters total, which is more or less my Scenario #1. We’ll know soon enough.
One last thing: Friday was the best day for Democrats of them all. Dems won each day by the metrics used. It seems likely that the Republicans will win Election Day and close the gap somewhat, possibly more than I’d like to think they will. This is one reason why I’m a bit skeptical of those late poll results that have Trump in a double-digit lead, though it’s more suggestive than conclusive. Everything I’ve seen so far tells me that this has been a better election so far for Democrats than 2012 and 2008, but there’s still Tuesday. I’ll know when you know.
Looking forward to seeing Harris County’s election returns on Tuesday night.