Tag Archives: turnout

November 2020 Early Voting Day Ten: Closing in on 2016

Posted on October 23, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

A couple of tweets to get us started: . 1.3 million (25%) ofTX early voters so far did not vote in 2016. #txlege — Keir Murray (@houtopia) 2:40 PM – 21 October 2020 I talked about the likely percentage of … Continue reading →

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Quinnipiac: Biden 47, Trump 47

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Very interesting. In the home stretch of the 2020 presidential election campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden is in a tied race with President Donald Trump in the reliably red state of Texas, and he holds a single digit lead … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Nine: Starting to run out of clever subtitles

Posted on October 22, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

And now, for something slightly different, Part One: This was hard for Jacob Monty. As a lifelong Republican, the 52-year old Houston attorney has been in the trenches with former President George W. Bush, never voted for a Democrat for … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Eight: Any idea what pattern we’ll follow?

Posted on October 21, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

The Chron provides five takeaways from early voting so far. Democrats appear to be doing well in Harris County, but don’t call it a wave yet. Turnout to date has been strong in precincts carried by Trump and Clinton in … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Seven: It’s Day One all over again, sort of

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

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 … Continue reading →

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Texas, the “We don’t want you to vote” state

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

And by “We” I mean “Republicans”. In five states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures, new policies allow all voters to use COVID-19 as an excuse to mail in their ballots. In Iowa, the Republican secretary of state sent absentee ballot applications for … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Six: And now we start the “normal” early voting period

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

I’m just going to jump right into the data here. The Day Six 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) … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Five: How not to look at the early voting totals

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

From Twitter on Friday: . Biden needs a rout in Harris County (#Houston) to have any chance of winning TX. We’ve had 3 days of record-shattering turnout and by tonight may have 500k votes. But so far, Biden probably isn’t … Continue reading →

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How hard it is to vote is a policy choice

Posted on October 18, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Harris County tried to make it easier. The state GOP, various other Republican contingents, Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, and others fought that choice every step of the way. Much of the Democrats’ dream of turning Texas blue is pinned on … Continue reading →

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All those voter registration efforts did what they set out to do

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

News item #1: Texas adds nearly 300,000 more voters in the last two weeks, approaches 17 million voters overall. In just two weeks, Texas added more than 284,000 more voters to its rolls just before the registration deadline and now … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Four: One hundred thousand is the magic number

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Lather, rinse, repeat. The county announced it had passed the 100K mark in a tweet just after 6 p.m. It was the four straight day with more than 100,000 ballots cast by county voters. Those four days now mark the … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Three: It’s still raining voters out there

Posted on October 16, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

People want to vote. About 1.9 million Texans had cast ballots in-person or by mail as of Wednesday, according to state and county election data, continuing to crush state records for early voting. The 2020 presidential election is expected to … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day Two: One million votes on Day One

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Pretty impressive so far. More than a million Texans have already cast ballots after just the first day of early voting. And the state isn’t even finished counting the first day’s numbers. Record breaking early voting, combined with unusually high … Continue reading →

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November 2020 Early Voting Day One: People sure were ready to vote

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

You’re going to hear the words “record-breaking” a lot. More than 125,000 Harris County residents went to the polls Tuesday to cast ballots on the first day of early voting, smashing the county’s previous records. As of about 7:30 p.m., … Continue reading →

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2020 early voting starts today

Posted on October 13, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

From the inbox: The Early Voting period for the November 2020 General Election begins tomorrow, Tuesday, October 13th, and continues through Friday, October 30th. This is the longest Early Voting period in Texas history, and voters who are not eligible … Continue reading →

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Military ballots

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

When we talk about the deadline to print and send out mail ballots, we are specifically talking about ballots sent to active duty military personnel, which by federal law are to be sent out 45 days before Election Day to … Continue reading →

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The swan song for eSlate machines

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

We’re still using them for this election, as clunky and outdated as they are, but they’re on the way out. Harris County may shatter turnout records with as many as 1.5 million voters in this year’s presidential election, the county … Continue reading →

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Trib overview of the Senate race

Posted on September 26, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

It really comes down to the top of the ticket. There’s no getting around it. Even before a pandemic struck, protests over racial justice took to the streets and a vacancy opened on the U.S. Supreme Court, this year’s U.S. … Continue reading →

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NYT/Siena: Trump 46, Biden 43

Posted on September 25, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

The second of two polls from yesterday, both of which are interesting in their own way. The NYT story about the poll, which included results from Iowa (Biden leading by3) and Georgia (tied), is behind their firewall, so I’ll give … Continue reading →

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Let’s not overstate the no-straight-ticket effect

Posted on September 24, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

With all due respect, this is some ado about not very much. With straight-ticket voting no longer an option in 2020, the Harris County Clerk estimates the average resident will spend a significantly longer time in the voting booth this … Continue reading →

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Sixteen point six million

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

That’s our current total of registered voters in Texas. Texas has once again shattered vote registration records, adding more than 1.5 million voters since the last presidential election. Texas now surpassed 16.6 million voters, according to the latest numbers announced … Continue reading →

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Don’t expect any surprises in the judicial races

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

There’s a simple reason why the Democratic candidates and incumbents are expected to win all the judicial races in Harris County, as they did in 2016 and 2018. I’ll tell you why in a minute, but see if you can … Continue reading →

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Recruiting poll workers

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

One good thing Facebook has ever done. Facebook has set out to recruit poll workers, providing free ads for state election officials to help fill jobs at voting centers in a very unusual election year. “With the election less than … Continue reading →

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They just don’t want you to vote by mail

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

It’s okay if you’re a Republican, of course. As states across the country scramble to make voting safer in a pandemic, Texas is in the small minority of those requiring voters who want to cast their ballots by mail to … Continue reading →

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Turning out more Asian-American voters

Posted on September 5, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Keep an eye on this. A national progressive group focused on getting Asian Americans to vote says it is going “all in” on Texas, looking to spend $1 million in the state where Asian Americans are the fastest growing segment … Continue reading →

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A very simple projection of the November vote

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

In my earlier post about the current state of voter registrations, I noted that you could see the county-by-county totals in the contest details for the Senate runoff. What that also means is that if you have current (till now, … Continue reading →

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A word about mail ballot drop boxes

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

I learned something in this story. Travis County voters nervous about delays with the post office will be able to hand-deliver mail-in ballots or drop them off at drive-thru sites this fall, County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said Tuesday. “If they … Continue reading →

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Harris County goes all in on voting access

Posted on August 27, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Wow. Harris County voters this November will have more time and more than a hundred additional places to cast ballots in the presidential election, including drive-through locations and one day of 24-hour voting, under an expansive plan approved by Commissioners … Continue reading →

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Despite it all, voter registration keeps increasing

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

You love to see it. Not even the worst pandemic to hit Texas in a century was enough to stem the surge in voter registrations that has remade the state’s electorate over the past four years. Just since March, Texas … Continue reading →

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The Kamala effect

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

I assume you are all aware that California Sen. Kamala Harris is now the Democratic nominee for Vice President. I didn’t post about that on Wednesday because it was hardly news by the time I published, but there are things … Continue reading →

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Interview with Sherrie Matula of Sisters United Alliance

Posted on August 3, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Sherrie Matula is a longtime Democratic activist (she was a founder of the BAAD Women club) and two-time candidate (for HD129 in 2008, and for HCDE in Precinct 2 in 2016, which she lost by 0.2 percentage points), but that’s … Continue reading →

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Abbott officially extends early voting for November

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

It’s just by a week, but at least the announcement has been made early. Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday extended the early voting period for the November election by six days, citing continued challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Early … Continue reading →

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Some brief runoff thoughts

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

You know the drill here… – The Election Night Results page at the SOS shows 955,735 votes total in the Democratic Senate runoff. That number is likely to increase a bit over the next few days, as we’ll see shortly. … Continue reading →

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Today is Primary Runoff Day

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Charles Kuffner

Last chance to vote for your party’s nominees. From the inbox: Today, Tuesday, July 14th, is Election Day for the July 2020 Primary Runoff Elections.Voters can cast their ballots anytime between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. at any of the … Continue reading →

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