As of 10:26 last night, Alejandra Salinas was leading Dwight Boykins in Harris County by about 5,500 votes. You can see the current unofficial results from Harris County here and the final results from Fort Bend County here. Boykins dominated in Fort Bend, winning it by 500 votes, but that wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent in Salinas’ Harris County advantage. When I wrote this, about two thirds of the voting centers in Harris had reported. I don’t see a path for Boykins to win. About 37K total votes had been cast in Harris County, with about 11K of them coming yesterday as of that time, so the final total in Harris should be a bit short of 45K but reasonably close to my WAG from the close of early voting.
Meanwhile HCC incumbent Renee Jefferson Patterson had a 500 vote advantage in a much smaller race. Both she and Salinas were around 57% of the vote. I feel pretty comfortable calling this one as well. Congrats to both of the winners. A Chron story on the Council race is here and on the HCC race is here.
As for SD09, turns out I was confused. It’s on January 31, the same day as the CD18 runoff. I’m not sure why I thought it was the same day as the Council runoff, but at least that explains why there had been no recent news about it.
If Salinas was ahead by 5000 votes and there were fewer than 8000 remaining, you could be very confident that Salinas would win. Boykins would have needed to go 6500-1500 (81.25% to 18.75% for a 62.5 point margin) even if the remaining vote total did reach 8000. I doubt there were many centers where Boykins hit 81% that had more than a couple dozen votes.
I mostly called it with only 36.5% of the Harris centers completed, but that was with incomplete information. My main errors were that I forgot Fort Bend Houston existed and, without better info, I assumed the same number of votes per voting center for the remaining 99 centers as there were for the first 57. That wasn’t correct as the remaining 99 centers had 79% more votes per center than the first.
That was a little surprising in that I assumed the number of votes per center had little to do with how long it took to count them. I guessed that physical location relative to where the votes were counted was the main factor.¹ I still assume that’s the case. I thought the more remote locations would likely have fewer votes. Anyway, that’s something for me to consider when looking at live results in the future, keeping in mind this was a Houston election and not a Harris County one.
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¹ I also considered the number of voting stations at a location, so somewhere like West Gray might take longer than a remote one, due to the time to clean up. Like most small elections, each voting location would have had an unnecessarily large number of voting machines. High volume ones would also have more end-of-session paper work with provisional ballots and the like. This is me overthinking things that don’t do me much good.
I would find it very interesting to see the data on which centers completed their counts in what order, along with their vote counts, distance from the counting center, and any data on provisional and canceled ballots.