Voter registration may be at an all-time high statewide, but here in Harris County we’ll be lucky to match 2004 totals.
Ahead of Monday’s registration deadline, about 1,912,000 citizens were on the voter roll as of Friday, county officials said. The number will grow as registrations continue through the weekend and mail postmarked by Monday arrives next week.
But the county must add 30,000 new eligible voters just to reach the 2004 level, and Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt, the county voter registrar, acknowledged a strong chance that the sign-ups will go no higher than the figure from four years ago.
Bettencourt predicted at midyear that registrations in the sprawling county would break the 2 million mark for the first time as groups such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now and the League of Women Voters mounted registration drives.
Texas has already set a record of 13.2 million voters qualified to cast ballots in next month’s election or early voting this month, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. The previous high was almost 13.1 million.
But unlike in past elections years, Bettencourt said, registration efforts are producing an exceptionally high number of voters who are re-registering to update their address and a relatively low number of people who have never registered before.
So despite new high-water marks being set in places like Hidalgo, Travis, and El Paso Counties, Harris County, which has certainly seen its share of population growth, is stagnant. Why is that? I think part of the answer is in that last paragraph, and part of it can be seen in an earlier story. From the Chron in July:
For starters, 2 million citizens older than 17, in a county of roughly 4 million people, would represent only meager growth from the last presidential election here. The 2004 roll fell only 60,000 shy of 2 million.
On the other hand, the roll dropped to 1.8 million a year ago, due in part to Bettencourt’s groundbreaking efforts under state and federal law to remove outmoded or improper registrations.
In other words, we started out 150,000 voter registrations in the hole. When you think of it in those terms, it’s amazing we are where we are now.
One of the challenges facing the county registrar’s office is the Houston area population’s apparent wanderlust. Half of the residents here rent their dwellings, according to the U.S. Census. Many switch locations every few months or years.
If those voters fail to update their registrations with new addresses, under federal law they are purged from the voter roll after two federal elections. In the meantime, they may be told at the voting place in their new neighborhood that they must return to their old neighborhood to vote.
Bettencourt voluntarily pursues voters to update their registrations after they move from one Harris County location to another. Using driver’s license address changes and other government records in a pioneering project, his staff sends letters to such voters — about 100,000 every summer — encouraging them to update their voter registrations.
As I hear it, those notices go to people’s old addresses, not to their new addresses, so it’s hard to say how effective that project is. Regardless, just having to get all these people updated puts a huge strain on volunteer efforts. So I ask again: Why is it so different in Harris? Is the so-called “wanderlust” cited that much greater here than elsewhere?
So with all that in mind, let’s return to the question of projecting turnout, both in Harris County and statewide. 1.2 million voters may well be greater than 60% turnout here – at 1,912,000 registrations, it would be 62.8%, and at 1.94 million, the same as 2004, it would be 61.9%. Given Bettencourt’s assertions that the vast majority of primary voters were people who had voted before, it seems reasonable to think that the already-registered would participate at a higher than usual level. I feel less comfortable projecting statewide turnout from this, so I’ll leave any further number crunching to you.