We had a big last day in early voting on Friday, as you can see below:
Year Mail Early Total
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2015 29,859 164,104 193,963
2019 15,304 137,460 152,764
2023 14,925 224,400 239,325
The final EV totals from 2015 are here and the final EV totals from 2019 are here. The daily EV report is being posted online now here, but I’m still grabbing a copy each day and saving it for my purposes. The Day Twelve file is here.
Like I said, Friday was big, with over 53K total votes, all but 896 in person. That’s about fifty percent more than was seen on the last day of 2015, and it puts the EV total for 2023 comfortably ahead of the earlier year. One effect of that was that it moved the estimated share of the Houston vote ahead of 2015 in terms of percentage of registered voters. I had done the same calculations as I had done for Day Eight on Friday, when we had one day left, and found that turnout as a percentage of RVs just for Houston in 2023 had slipped behind 2015, with the latter standing at 10.20% and this year at 10.14%. After Friday, however, this year retook the lead, 13.06% to 12.64%. Well done, all.
I will remind you that these numbers are based on multiple assumptions, and so could be off in an assortment of ways. Even if I’m completely accurate, the differences are very small, and it would still be true to say that turnout in 2023 is not really different than it was in 2015 once you factor in the increase in registered voters. That too was something I discussed a long time ago, when I first pointed out that there are a lot more RVs in Houston now than there were eight years ago. The higher raw numbers are totally expected. It’s just a matter of where we go from here.
One more thing to note for now, and I’ll be back tomorrow with some guesses about final turnout. We’ve discussed the reduction in voting by mail for this election, especially when compared to 2015. A big part of this is simply that fewer mail ballots were sent to voters this year, for whatever the reason. Those that did receive a mail ballot have been pretty good about sending them back:
2015 – 29,859 ballots returned out of 43,280 sent, 68.99% return rate
2019 – 15,304 ballots returned out of 26,824 sent, 57.05% return rate
2023 – 14,925 ballots returned out of 21,158 sent, 70.54% return rate
Good job, 2023 mail voters. Remember that ballots that are received by Tuesday are still counted, so the final number of ballots returned will increase a bit. I’ll make my projections tomorrow and of course I’ll review it all afterwards. Did you vote early, or are you an Election Day person? Leave a comment and let us know.
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