Off the Kuff

This Chron story about early voting through Sunday made me grind my teeth.

One week in, early voting turnout has surpassed the levels seen in the last two Houston mayoral elections — but not overwhelmingly so — perhaps a surprise given the prominence of front-runners John Whitmire and Sheila Jackson Lee and the national attention the race has earned.

About 101,000 Harris County residents have already voted early this election cycle, either by mail or in person, compared with about 63,000 Harris County residents one week into the 2019 early voting period and about 82,000 residents during the same time period in 2015, the last time there was an open mayoral race.

But raw vote totals do not tell the whole story. There are also significantly more registered voters in the county: nearly 2.6 million registered voters in Harris County this election cycle, up from 2.1 million in November 2015.

If you consider turnout as a percentage of total registered voters, turnout is actually lower this year than in 2015. It sits at just 3.9% of total registered voters in Harris County this election cycle, compared to about 4% during the 2015 cycle.

Well, I agree that the whole story has not been told. This is because “Harris County” and “Houston” are two separate entities, and so one has to be extra careful when making comparisons. Let’s take a deeper and more complex look at the numbers, because I believe the picture being painted here is misleading.

To be clear, article author Matt Zdun is comparing Harris County turnout in 2015 and 2023, and I don’t have a quibble with that. But his references to the open Mayoral race, which was also a feature of 2015, and expressing “surprise” that turnout isn’t higher than it is – even though it definitely is in raw numbers – gives the impression that the Mayor’s race this year is somehow falling short. What I’m saying is I don’t believe you can come to that conclusion with the numbers provided.

What I mean by that is perhaps best expressed as a chart, which shows the number of registered voters in Houston and Harris County, and the percentage of those voters in Houston:

Year    Hou RVs   Harris RVs   Hou Pct
======================================
2015    979,401    2,054,717    47.67%
2019  1,085,813    2,329,277    46.62%
2022  1,133,155    2,543,162    44.56%
2023  1,154,157*   2,590,121    44.56%*

The asterisks for 2023 are because those are estimates. I used the percentage from 2022 to estimate the current number of RVs in Houston based on the November 2023 RV figure for Harris County. The real number is likely a bit smaller, but I have no idea how much smaller. Note that if I used a smaller RV figure for Houston, the effect I’m about to show would be greater.

My point here is that the growth in Harris County voter registration is about 30% from Houston, and 70% from not-Houston. As such, given that there’s nothing more exciting for non-Houston people to vote on now than in 2015, the rate of growth of turnout should be a bit slower than the rate of growth of RVs, since most of those RVs aren’t voting in this Mayoral race.

Let me throw another chart at you, this one providing a different turnout estimate based on an estimate of the share of the early vote that’s actually coming from Houston:

Year   Hou vote  Harris vote   Hou Pct
======================================
2015    268,872      421,460    63.80%
2019    244,979      389,494    62.90%

The point here is that the turnout report we get doesn’t specify how many of those voters were actually in Houston. But we can estimate that based on those final percentages above. Doing that, using the numbers given for 2015 and 2019, and using 63.0% for 2023 based on the increased voter registration disparity but somewhat mitigated by the open Mayoral race, and we get the following; yes, one more chart:

Year    Hou EV    Hou RVs  EV TO
================================
2015    52,411    979,401  5.35%
2019    39,461  1,085,813  3.63%
2023    63,604  1,154,157  5.51%

I have made at least three assumptions in calculating these numbers. One, my estimate of Houston’s 2023 registered voter total. Two, my estimate of the 2023 Houston share of the Harris County vote. And three, that the final ratio of Houston-to-Harris voters is the same for early voting. Any of these could be off in any direction and by any amount, so my entire construction here is held together by duct tape and dental floss.

But that’s basically my point here. These numbers are more subtle and complex than they are being portrayed by Matt Zdun. My assumptions may be wrong, but I think they’re all very reasonable, and if anything I’ve erred on the side of making that final comparison less favorable to 2023. The bottom line, which I’ve used a lot of words to get to, is that you can’t just conclude that early voting turnout is “down” compared to 2015, not based on just the Harris County turnout and RV totals. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, and there’s definitely an argument that it isn’t. Don’t draw conclusions you can’t fully justify.

All this still overlooks two other points. One is that an increase in early voting doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in overall voting. As we’ve discussed before, it may be that what we are seeing is mostly a shift in voting behavior, which has very much been the case in even-numbered years but not in the odd years, at least so far. I have not seen any analysis of the voter roster, which might indicate if what we’re seeing is mostly old reliables with no noticeable bump in new voters. I’m not in a position to analyze that myself, so I’ll just keep caveating myself.

And two, there’s a non-trivial number of Houston votes that get cast in Fort Bend County, too. In 2019 there were 4,187 such votes, and in 2015 it was 4,847. Again, not a huge amount – I have no idea how many so far – but they can be consequential, as the 2015 Mayoral runoff made clear. It wouldn’t shock me if Fort Bend adds in another 6-7K total votes in the end. Comparing Harris to Harris year-over-year is fine – I do it all the time, and it keeps things consistent. Just don’t forget that it’s not the whole story.

With all that out of the way, here’s today’s EV update:

Year    Mail     Early    Total
===============================
2015   23,650   73,905   97,555
2019    9,699   66,255   75,954
2023    9,816  106,731  116,547

The final EV totals from 2015 are here and the final EV totals from 2019 are here. The daily EV report is being posted online now here, but I’m still grabbing a copy each day and saving it for my purposes. The Day Eight file is here.

I’ve already said plenty, so I’ll just note that the totals for this Monday and the Week 2 Monday from 2015 are nearly the same – this Monday was slightly ahead, but by like a hundred or so – which means that if I did the same turnout calculation as above, 2023 would be slightly less ahead of 2015. But even if it had slipped behind, the same point would hold. You’ve got to really do the work to be able to say anything about the turnout.

We are officially one week into early voting for the November 2023 election. Here’s how it’s been going in Harris County so far:

Year    Mail     Early    Total
===============================
2015   21,141   61,008   82,149
2019    6,799   55,937   62,736
2023    9,284   91,676  100,960

The final EV totals from 2015 are here and the final EV totals from 2019 are here. The daily EV report is being posted online now here, but I’m still grabbing a copy each day and saving it for my purposes. The Day Seven file is here.

Before I get to my crazy theory, two points to note. One is just that Week One this year was super high volume. The difference in in-person voting is astonishing, more than making up the gap in mail ballots. Whatever else is going on, people have been turning out at a nice clip so far. And honestly, that shouldn’t be a surprise. At least four Mayoral campaigns have been advertising at some reasonably heavy level to push their voters out, and so they have been. (I haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that Annie Garcia has been using that $1.5 million loan to her campaign yet, but perhaps the 8 day report will tell me something.) The campaigns for the two city propositions, the Harris County hospital bond, and several state propositions have also had visible ads. The first rule is making sure people know there’s an election, and that has been happening.

The second point is that the gap in mail ballots is unlikely to decrease. In 2015, over 43K total mail ballots were sent to voters, while this year that total is just under 21K. That’s fewer than the total number of mail ballots already returned in 2015. The ballot return rate was just under 50% at this point in 2015, and it’s a bit under 45% so far this year, so not too different. Almost 70% of mail ballots were returned in 2015 as of the end of early voting; if we match that this year, another 5-6K will arrive. All of that happening would make the final gap around 15K. The in person total has well more than made up for that as noted, but Week Two and especially the last day can get busy for in person voting, so there is some volatility.

And that brings me to my crazy theory, which honestly is pretty straightforward. One possible – indeed, I’d say likely – explanation for at least part of the increase in early voter turnout so far is simply that we have longer hours for early voting in the first week now than we did in 2015, or any year before 2018. In 2015, early voting in Week One still ran from 8 AM to 4:30 PM for Monday through Friday. It was 7 to 7 on Saturday, then 1 to 6 PM on Sunday. Now it is 7 AM to 7 PM every day except Sunday, when it is noon to 7. Just look at the EV reports that I’ve linked to above, the hours for each day are listed. Longer hours = more voters. It’s quite simple.

Does that account for all of the difference? Probably not, and there would be no way to tell for sure in any event. Does this mean that more people are shifting from Election Day to voting early, or maybe from Week 2 to Week 1? Maybe, but it’s too soon to tell. What about the fact that there are now (per the SOS) 550K more registered voters in Harris County than there were in 2015? (There were as previously noted about 150K more voters in the Harris County part of the City of Houston in November 2022 than there were in 2015; that number is likely a bit bigger now.) That surely has some effect as well. Point being, there are multiple factors here. Early voting hours are one of them. I’m sure it had some effect on the turnout so far. How much, and what it means beyond that, is not a question I can answer, at least not now. All I’m saying is, if you see reporting that talks about the level of turnout so far, these are things to keep in mind whether the story mentions them or not.