The county announced it had passed the 100K mark in a tweet just after 6 p.m. It was the four straight day with more than 100,000 ballots cast by county voters.
Those four days now mark the four highest single-day totals in the county’s early voting history.
Through the first four days of early voting, roughly 500,000 Harris County residents have cast their ballots at early voting locations or through the mail. That is about half the total early and absentee turnout from 2016, when some 985,000 Harris County residents voted before Election Day.
Seemed like yesterday started out slowly, with the rain in the area, but by the end of the day we had reached the same 100K benchmark as before. Saturday has always been a heavy day during early voting, but that’s been in the context of shorter first week hours and only Saturday of the EV period. I expect it will still be busy, but maybe not much different than what we’ve seen so far. But who knows?
Here are your Day One, Day Two, and Day Three numbers, and we’ll go ahead and finish off that daily comparison to finish the first work week.
Year Day One Day Two Day Three Day Four Total
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2008 39,201 43,411 43,782 44,235 170,629
2012 47,093 51,578 52,051 51,240 201,962
2016 64,471 73,542 76,098 76,329 290,440
2018 63,188 64,781 62,476 58,938 249,383
2020 128,186 114,996 105,175 104,870 453,227
Year Day One Day Two Day Three Day Four Total
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2008 68,502 44,428 47,991 45,503 206,424
2012 87,679 55,105 53,744 54,765 251,293
2016 129,014 76,376 81,744 79,349 366,483
2018 115,601 66,315 64,035 63,164 309,115
2020 169,523 118,008 111,435 112,709 511,675
Top table is in person votes, bottom is all votes. The Day Four daily EV totals are here. You can find the daily totals for 2008 and 2012 (and 2016 as well, but I’ve got a separate link for it) here, for 2016 here, and for 2018 here. We’re now over 58K mail ballots returned, so I feel pretty comfortable saying we’ll be at least at parity with 2016 by the time we see the Monday number. A bit less than one fourth of all the ballots that have been sent out have been returned so far.
I don’t have much to add today. Here’s the Derek Ryan report, and here’s a Texas Monthly story that puts some context onto what we’ve seen. Remember, Monday is the day that early voting would have started. Have you voted yet?
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