As always after an election, I received an early copy of the canvass report, which tells me how the vote went in each individual precinct. Unlike other years, I didn’t have a clear direction for what to do with it, because there’s no obvious basis for comparisons. There are no partisan races, and no Mayoral contest, so it’s hard to say what questions to try to answer. So I sat on this for awhile, but with 2017 about to exit stage right, I figured I should finally do something with the data I had. Since turnout, or lack of it, is what everyone was talking about in this election, I thought I’d try to learn something about that. In general, we know what usually brings people to the polls in city elections – a contested Mayor’s race and contentious referenda. We had neither this time, so I thought I’d try to see if the bond issues we did have did more to draw people out than the HISD races did.
I don’t know that I have an answer, but I do have a couple of data points. First, in the precincts where there was an HISD race on the ballot, did more people vote in that HISD race than they did in the bond elections?
Dist PropA HISD
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I 9,490 8,900
III 3,365 3,114
V 8,583 7,656
VI 7,182 6,396
VII 11,848 11,471
IX 7,622 7,454
I used Prop A, the pension obligation bonds issue, as my proxy for all the city issues. It didn’t actually have the most votes, but their totals were all within about one percent of each other, so it’s good enough for our purposes. The totals for some districts, especially V and IX, are less than what you’ll find on the County Clerk’s page, because several of the precincts in those districts are outside city limits. Note also that I added up total votes cast in each, not ballots cast. That’s basically the whole point here – if someone voted in the HISD race but not for Prop A, I assume the HISD race is the main reason this person voted, and vice versa. In all cases, Prop A drew more votes.
The other way to look at this is to simply compare turnout in precincts that had an HISD race to precincts that didn’t. If you add up the total votes cast for Prop A in the precincts that had no HISD race, you get 48,630 votes cast out of 613,206 voters, for 7.93% turnout. The figures for the districts are as follows:
District 1 – 9,490 votes, 78,067 voters, 12.16% turnout
District 3 – 3,365 votes, 55,207 voters, 6.10% turnout
District 5 – 8,583 votes, 60,555 voters, 14.17% turnout
District 6 – 7,182 votes, 72,931 voters, 9.85% turnout
District 7 – 11,848 votes 88,949 voters, 13.32% turnout
District 9 – 7,622 votes, 74,716 voters, 10.20% turnout
Add it up and for all of HISD you get 48,090 votes, 430,425 voters, and 11.17% turnout. So yes, as one would expect, having an HISD race on the ballot in addition to the city bonds meant people were more likely to show up than just having the bonds. The difference, in this case, is a bit more than three percentage points.
So there you have it. There may have been other questions to investigate, but like most people, my attention turned to 2018 as soon as this was in the books. The next city election will be more like what we’re used to. We’ve got plenty to occupy ourselves with until then.
In the HISD runoff analysis I found the VBM impact was significant. For those candidates who may be facing a primary run-off it would be wise to focus on VBM voters who automatically get the ballot. VBM can be submitted new years day