And we are done with early voting for the HCAD runoffs. Here’s the final EV report. Let’s have another chart, shall we?
Month Mail Early Total
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May 14,152 19,500 33,652
June 11,043 18,048 29,091
As predicted yesterday, we have surpassed one percent turnout. That may be the faintest praise with which one can be damned, but given how low the expectations were going in, getting this far just in early voting has to count as a minor achievement. We did get a bump on each of the last two days – it does warm my heart to observe that even in the weirdest circumstances, some patterns remain true. We also saw 8,344 mail ballots come in after Day One, bringing the total so far more or less into the expected range. It won’t surprise me to see a decent increase in the mail ballot total when the results are posted on Saturday night. There have been at least 800 ballots returned every day for which there is mail service, so if that persists we could see another 3200 or so mail votes in the final tally. It may not be quite that much – I would be hesitant to count on any ballot mailed after today in Saturday’s total – but it will be more than this.
I will not provide a guess about final turnout, but I will note that for the May election, about 39% of the total vote was cast on the Saturday. I think we are likely to fall short of May’s total, and it would take a sufficient mail haul between now and Saturday to make me think we’ll top two percent overall turnout, but it could happen. Again, this is all ridiculous and wasteful, a transparent effort by the Republicans to gin up an election in Harris County they can win, but it is what it is. I’ll have a post about where to vote on Saturday later in the week. If you still haven’t voted yet, go get out there on Saturday.
As a proud member of the Loyal Order of Traditional Last Day Early Voters, all I can say is that one of these days I’ll quit procrastinating.
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