Here’s a mid-day headline that needed some revision by the evening.
Harris County is on pace to reach half of of 2016’s total voter turnout by Monday evening, the county clerk reported.
By 11 a.m. Monday, the seventh day of early voting, more than 20,000 local ballots had been cast, putting the county on pace for about 690,000 total by the time polls close for the day at 7 p.m. That would be about 51 percent of the 1.3 million county voters who cast ballots in the presidential election four years ago.
The volume of voters has declined since last week, when more than 100,000 turned out for four consecutive days. The Harris County clerk’s website showed just one of 112 polling sites, the North Channel Branch Library, with a wait time exceeding 40 minutes at noon on Monday.
Across Texas, 4.1 million residents have cast ballots, more than any other state.
For whatever the reason, Monday started kind of slow. Things picked up later in the day, and the eventual total for the day exceeded that projection. I’ll get to the overall figures in a bit, but first the preliminaries. The Day Seven daily EV totals are here. You can find the daily totals for 2008 and 2012 (and 2016 as well, but I’ve got a separate link for it) here, for 2016 here, and for 2018 here. As this is essentially Day One for the normal early voting period, I’m going to compare today’s totals with the Day One numbers from previous years. In other words, a reprise of this post, with updated mail ballot totals.
Election Mail Early Total
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2008 29,301 39,201 68,502
2012 40,566 47,093 87,659
2016 61,543 64,471 129,014
2018 52,413 63,188 115,601
2020 92,610 74,026 166,636
“Total” isn’t accurate for this year, but if today had been Day One, you can see that we still would have outpaced previous elections. The mail ballot certainly played a role in that, but the in person totals were a new high compared to the other years as well, even if they’re down a bit from last week. Like I said, we couldn’t keep up that pace forever. Now let’s update the numbers for 2020:
Vote type Saturday Sunday Monday Total
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Mail 8,807 8,249 17,106 92,610
Drive-thru 7,806 4,135 6,347 60,452
In person 57,675 30,361 67,679 566,778
Total 74,288 42,745 628,708 719,840
We are now at 73.0% of 2016 early turnout (including mail), and 53.8% of total 2016 turnout. At today’s pace, we’d reach 2016’s early vote turnout of 985,571 by close of business on Thursday. There were 101,594 mail ballots returned in 2016, and it seems likely at this pace we will pass that either today or tomorrow. A total of 244,359 mail ballots have been sent out, and so far 37.9% of them have been returned. My estimate remains that some 185K mail ballots will ultimately be cast, so we’re basically halfway there.
An average of 56,278 voters per day for the remaining 11 days of early voting is needed to equal final 2016 turnout of 1,338,898. That’s down from 59,182 yesterday. Oh, and we have a new number for voter registration:
.
The final voter registration total in Harris County (#Houston) is 2,481,081.
That’s an increase of **298,101** — the same as registering the entire population of Orlando here in the past four years.— Zach Despart (@zachdespart) 4:21 PM – 19 October 2020
If turnout as a percentage of registered voters is 61.33% as it was in 2016, then 1.52 million people will vote. If it’s 62.81% as it was in 2008, then 1.55 million will vote. Turnout of 68.62% is needed to get us to 1.7 million, as suggested by County Clerk Chris Hollins. I would not say that is out of reach.
Finally, here’s a interesting analysis of the vote through the weekend by Brandon Rottinghaus, with a nifty visualization from Jeronimo Cortina. Have you voted yet?
Given the high level of inaccuracy of the voter rolls, I anticipate no more than 63% of registered voters will participate by Nov. 3. If so, almost half of all voters who plan to vote have done so:
Year Total Turnout Registered voters Harris Co.
2008 62.8% 1,892,656
2012 62.0% 1,942,566
2016 61.3% 2,182,980
2020 29.0% by Mon., Oct. 19 2,481,081