Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Texas added nearly 200,000 voters to its rolls in the two weeks before the deadline to register, according to state data, giving the state a record-breaking 18.6 million voters going into this year’s election.
Since 2016, when Donald Trump first won Texas, the state has added 3.5 million voters — equal to the entire voting population of Wisconsin.
[…]
Even with more strictly policed voter registration rolls, Texas is still adding voters faster than its booming population growth. Since 2020, the state’s population has grown by about 1.6%, according to the U.S. Census. But the state’s voter rolls have grown almost 10% since that, according to the newest voter registration totals released by the Texas secretary of state’s office.
That growth is coming from a surge of younger voters turning 18, transplants from other states and more aggressive voter registration efforts by both partisan and non-partisan groups.
It’s all happened as Texas’ elections have become more competitive. In 2020, Trump carried Texas, but by just 5.6 percentage points — the closest race in Texas in almost 30 years and the ninth closest state presidential race in the country.
No county has seen a bigger jump in voter registrations since the last presidential election in 2020 than Harris County. More than 200,000 voters have been added to the roles since then. Bexar County was the second fastest growing with 106,000 added voters.
The previous report had us at 18.4 million, so this isn’t very different but it does include a Harris County number, which interests me. There were 2,431,457 RVs in Harris County in 2020, so we’re above 2.6 million now, possibly around 2.65 million. Just to throw a few more numbers at you, if we turn out at the same rate (68.14%) in Harris County as we did in 2020, that gets us to 1.8 million total votes. The HCDP’s stated goal of getting to 1.1 million votes for Kamala Harris looks pretty doable in that context – a reach, to be sure, but doable. We would probably need to have had at least 1.3 million votes cast at the end of early voting for that to be in range. When will you be casting your vote, if you haven’t already?
As a late note, as of 8:30 PM when I scheduled this for publication, we hadn’t gotten the daily EV record for Monday. We did get a tweet from the Harris County Clerk Elections Department that over 124.7K people had cast an in person ballot; that number may creep up a bit as the tweet came in at 7:05 and it’s possible there were still more votes being cast. Be that as it may and as impressive as it is, it’s not the record. On Day One in 2020, there were 128,082 in person votes cast. That was on October 13 of that year, a week early because of COVID and the extra week of early voting that we got. It was also a Tuesday, as the Monday had been Indigenous Peoples Day, so that adds to the difficulty in making a direct comparison. We also don’t have the mail ballot total yet – it was 41,337 on Day One in 2020. I’ll have a report tomorrow, and will likely be a day behind more often than not.
I think more people are coming to understand that lines are common on the first day so they are choosing to use a different early voting day.
The Clerk’s office posted this last night about 10 – https://appfiles.harrisvotes.com/harrisvotes/prd/docs/Uploads/EVPA_unofficial.pdf
The tl;dr is 125,472 in person, 27,027 mail ballots returned (of 71,242 sent).
Gonna make that 125,473 this afternoon…
Voting Early and Voting Often !
I voted yesterday at the Hilton north of the Galleria just after lunchtime. The wait was about 15 minutes or so, busy but not too bad. There were plenty of machines and the staff was moving the process along pretty quickly and smoothly.
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Voted yesterday on the West side of Pearland, no wait.