The Sunday of early voting is always the slowest day, as it has the shortest hours and no mail delivery. This Sunday was no exception, as a total of 780 ballots were cast, all in person. That brings the in person total to 10,282. As it happens, the mail ballot total ticked up a bit even though no new ballots were received, but 547 of the previously received ones that had not yet been counted were cured – that is, missing information on the ballot was supplied by the sender – bringing that total up to 13,446. That takes us to 23,728 total votes cast with two days of early voting to go.
I’ve said before and will say again that I’m not going to guess what turnout may wind up being. I will say that I had been mentally drawing an over/under line of 30K early ballots as of Friday, and as of today that line hasn’t moved. Maybe today’s returns will make me rethink. I hope it does, because at this pace I don’t see us getting anywhere close to the 4-5 percent turnout of past May elections. We’ll be lucky to top two percent at this rate. We have these days and next Saturday to change that trajectory. Go vote if you still haven’t. It’s like you’re voting for a couple dozen other people as well.
For some reason I got the May 28 mail ballot way before the May 4th one, so be sure you have sent in the right one ( and don’t get the envelopes mixed up).
My spouse and I did our part for the HCAD election. Now we have to find where the ESD is hiding their early voting (and their candidates, for that matter), since it’s not joint with the county.