We have completed five days of early voting for the May special HCAD and SD15 elections, with four more days to go. The Day Five daily EV report is here. There have been 7,980 in person votes and 12,901 mail votes for a total of 20,881. Another way to look at this is there have been about 1,600 in person votes per day, and about 2K mail ballots have arrived since day one. The daily in person total has ticked up each day, which is positive, but who knows what that means going forward.
I’m very much not in the business of trying to guess what happens from here. I don’t know if we’ll get the last day spike in early in person voting. I don’t know how that went in the earlier May elections, and I’m not sure how relevant it would be anyway. I have no idea if we’re likely to have the bulk of the vote cast early or if there will be a significant May 4 turnout. Given that the norm for non-Presidential year elections in the past was for half or more of the vote to be made on Election Day, one might guess this will be similar. If nothing else, the fact that word is probably still just beginning to reach some voters about the election, that is a plausible scenario. Against that, I’ve been burned in each of the last two elections projecting Election Day totals from past performances, which tells me that we have in general become an electorate that just prefers early voting, and that suggests that the Election Day cohort will be smaller than I think. This election is a unicorn and I don’t know what if any trends may apply. We’ll be taking it as it comes. Feel free to make your own guesses, but count me out of that. Have you voted yet?