Haven’t I already answered this question?
Few voters have cast ballots in an ongoing Houston City Council special election despite the area consistently recording the highest turnout of the city’s 11 districts in past elections.
As of Sunday night, only 4,733 people had voted for a new District C council representative. Early voting ends Tuesday ahead of Election Day on Saturday.
The district – which includes Meyerland, Montrose, the Heights and Oak Forest – has been Houston’s highest-turnout district in each of the last five November elections, and topped 37,000 ballots in each of the last three.
[…]
The low vote total didn’t surprise Nancy Sims, a longtime City Hall lobbyist and politics lecturer at the University of Houston. The odd timing of the special election and the fact that there is nothing else on the April 4 ballot were bound to depress turnout even in a politically active area, she said.
“This is the most civically engaged council district in Houston,” Sims said. “It has an extraordinary number of active civic clubs … I would call the whine factor extremely high, because these will be the first people to call and say the garbage isn’t getting picked up. My recycling’s behind. My street is cracked.”
Sims also noted a lack of anger to drive voters to the polls. The race does not contain a candidate voters would be motivated to oppose.
“When there’s anger or rage, or someone to really be against, voter turnout is always higher,” Sims said. “In this council race, there’s just a nice group of seven people.”
Why, yes I have already answered this. In addition to the correct things Nancy Sims said, it’s a special election. Even plenty of generally well-engaged people are not fully aware of it. That is how it is. But the early voting numbers are on track for a higher-than-usual final turnout. I suggested that could get to seven percent turnout, above the usual range of four to six percent in other off-month special elections, if they reached 6000 early votes. Well, they got to 6,408, thanks to the usual last-two-days surge. Is that a lot in absolute terms? No, of course not. But it’s a special election. In April. And it could end up the top-performing non-November special election for City Council. Not too bad when you think of it that way.
As a reminder, all of my candidate interviews, with links to the interview transcripts, are here:
Sophia Campos
Audrey Nath
Joe Panzarella
Angelica Luna Kaufman
Nick Hellyar
Laura Gallier
Patrick Oathout
Last chance to vote is Saturday. Get it done if you are in the district and you haven’t yet.