Here are your Early Voting totals for Day Two and Day Three. As a reminder, here’s my spreadsheet from 2009; the Erik Vidor spreadsheet that has running totals from 2009, 2007, and 2005; and a new addition to my data sets, courtesy of the County Clerk’s office, the full daily EV report from 2007, which includes individual tallies from each EV location. Let’s do a chart to summarize:
Type 2005 2007 2009 2011 ===================================== In Person 8,611 5,950 11,916 7,930 Absentee 1,238 2,328 3,276 3,350 Total 9,849 8,278 15,192 11,280 09 Pct 64.8% 54.5% 100% 74.2%
“09 Pct” is the fraction of that year’s total compared to 2009. So far, not too bad for 2011. Maybe this won’t keep up – remember, in 2005, a huge share of the early vote came in the last couple of days. If there’s less of a surge in the last days of EV this time than what we usually see, that will shade everything down. It’s too early to tell.
We now also have Kyle Johnston’s detailed analyses from Day One and Day Two, which tell you everything you could want to know about who has voted so far in the City of Houston. Two things to note: One is that a mere half of the votes from Monday were City of Houston. My suspicion was that this was skewed by the first day accumulation of mail ballots. That turned out to be a decent guess, as the two day City of Houston vote total of 5,187 represents about 65% of the two day Harris County total of 7,959. That’s right in line with historic norms. Two, note that 75% of all ballots cast on Day One were from people who had voted in each of the last three city elections. Another 17% came from people who had voted in two of the last three elections. Putting it another way, only 8% of the votes came from people who are not habitual voters, and I’d bet a decent number of this group weren’t eligible to vote in the city in previous elections. This is why I say that polls that rely on respondents to self-screen for likelihood of voting cannot be trusted. Your actions speak way louder than your words, and if you don’t have a demonstrated history of voting in these elections, I don’t care what you say – you are not a “likely” voter.
for the love of god, how many times do i have to keep saying it-there is going to be a nice solid voter turn out this cycle-there are a half a million canidates running and the city is 90 percent aware that early has begun-lets hope this puts an end to this tom foolery spec calls-there is going to be a good solid voter turn out this cycle no matter how many times people blog about it.
joshua ben bullard