The Day One primary runoff early voting report was sent out late last night by the County Clerk’s office. You can see the totals for each location here. Basically, Democrats had 731 in person voters and 3785 mail ballots returned, for a total of 4516; Republicans had 2016 in person voters and 7592 mail ballots returned, for a total of 9608. On Day One of Round One, there were 2,774 in-person GOPers plus 5,946 returned mail ballots, and 2,190 Dems plus 2,886 mailers.
My guess is that the runoff for Harris County Republican Party Chair is driving turnout on that side. Turnout in the 2008 Republican primary runoff was over 40,000, driven by the District Attorney race. Turnout on the Democratic side, with no particularly compelling races to draw people out, was under 10,000. Note that in each case, a large majority of the votes were cast before Election Day: For Democrats, out of 9670 votes, 4569 (47.25%) were absentee, 3045 (31.49%) were in person early, and only 2056 (21.26%) were cast on Election Day. For Republicans, out of 40,457 votes, 11,373 (28.05%) were absentee, 14,912 (36.86%) were in person early, and 14,262 (35.25%) were on Election Day. In short, don’t expect the final turnout to be that much higher than what we’ve gotten as of Friday night.
Anyway, early voting goes from 7 AM to 7 PM at all of the usual EV locations through Friday, and as I said before you won’t encounter any lines. If you did not vote in March, you may participate in either runoff, but if you did vote in March you may only vote in the same party’s runoff. I doubt that’s a concern for anyone, but there you have it anyway. Get out there and vote while you can – fewer people voting means your ballot counts for that much more.
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