We head into the last week of Early Voting with a total of 30,463 ballots being cast so far; of those, 26,662 were done in person. That compares to 27,590 in person from 2003, and 31,440 total counting mail ballots. Bear in mind that in 2003, there were 8,398 in person votes cast over the weekend, during which time the polls were only open from 1 to 6 PM each day. This weekend saw only 7,296 ballots cast, and that’s with Saturday’s polls being open from 7 AM to 7 PM. If you want solid evidence that this year’s turnout really will lag that year’s, that might be it.
As a reminder, my spreadsheet tracking the daily totals for this year is here, and my doc with the historic totals is here. We’ll see how it goes this week. Thanks to the little tiff over who’s the real friend of the African-American community, there may be a little more heat in the race, and that may help move a few votes. Note that as we compare totals from this week to the corresponding days from 2003, Early Voting hours remained 8 to 4:30 through Wednesday. Only Thursday and Friday were 7 to 7, as it will be each day this week. Thirty thousand people cast ballots on those two days six years ago. Will we see anything like that? Stay tuned. Have you voted yet; if so, when did you do it, and if not when do you plan to?
My suspicion (gut feeling only), is that while early vote this year is comparable to 2003, Election Day won’t come close. Counting Ft. Bend, in 2003, Election Day turnout was about 215,000 in the City. I bet it’s closer to 150,000 this time, which would likely give us a total City vote of around 220,000.
We shall see!