2021 Day One EV report: Everyone likes voting by mail

Lots of mail ballots have been cast so far. Much more than any other kind.

Early voting began Monday for a handful of area school board and municipal races, state constitutional amendments and hundreds of millions of dollars in school district and municipal utility bonds.

Mail-in voting skyrocketed in Harris County with elections officials tallying 29,005 ballots on Monday compared to 5,335 on the first day of the 2017 election—the last comparable election.

Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria said county’s mailing of ballot applications to eligible voters over 65 contributed to the increase, a 444 percent jump compared to 2017— the last comparable election.

According to elections officials, 2,643 ballots were cast Monday in early in-person voting. By comparison, Monday’s total is three percent lower than the total first day of in-person voting in 2017.

Longoria said the decrease can be attributed to the items Houston had to vote on in that election which pulled more voters to the polls.

“From my perspective, basically, the same number of voters without the pull of city of Houston is a pretty good start,” Longoria said.

I’ve got the Day One totals here. I’m probably just going to do a couple of these updates, since the day to day activity is likely to be minimal, but I can tell you that 29K mail ballots is more than double the total number received in 2017, and almost as many as were cast in the much-higher turnout 2015 election. Some of this is the sending of ballot applications to all of the over-65 folks in the county (last time we’ll be doing that, thank you Greg Abbott very much) and some of it is just that more people have been voting by mail in recent elections and they like it. There will come a day, I just know it, when we will look back at what the Legislature did to voting rights this year, and wonder what the hell they were thinking.

As far as final turnout goes, we look back to 2017, the last (and so far only other) election that did not have city races. Final turnout was about 101K, with about 149K total votes in Harris County. There were some city bond issues on the ballot that year, which probably drove a bit of turnout. I’d put the early over/under line at that level, but I won’t be surprised if we fail to get there.

This is also our first election with new voting machines:

This election is the debut of new paper ballot machines that the county bought , Longoria added.

“The machines are running well,” she said. “What we are hearing is voters appreciate being able to see the result of how they voted and then to turn that vote into the ballot box.”

Yes, this expectedly low-turnout election is the shakedown cruise for the new machines. I’ll post my review of them when I go vote later in the week, but if you’ve already done your thing please let us know what you think of them.

One more thing, because this is cool:

You can see that on the last page of the EV report I linked to above. You want to know where the actual voters are coming from, and at what time of day, this is for you. I like it.

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