early voting

Precinct analysis: Early voting versus Election Day

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In his pre-election analyses of the early vote, Republican consultant Derek Ryan (whose numbers I have used in the past) suggested that there was still a significant number of regular Republican voters who had not voted yet, which could make Election Day redder than early voting was. I thought I’d take a look at the data to see how accurate that was. Short answer: Pretty accurate.


Candidate   Early%  E-Day%  Total%  Ratio
=========================================
Abbott     53.75%   57.05%  54.80%   1.06
Beto       45.14%   40.98%  43.81%   0.91
Others      1.11%    1.97%   1.39%   1.77

Note that “Early” here includes mail ballots, as the Secretary of State website combines mail ballots with early in person ballots to give that number. “Ratio” is just the Election Day percentage divided by the Early percentage, which you can interpret to mean that Abbott did about six percent better on Election Day while Beto did about nine percent worse. The Others include the Libertarian and Green candidates plus two write-ins. I am greatly amused by the fact that their voters are the real traditionalists for voting on Tuesday.

If you’ve followed the numbers from Harris County, you know that Democrats overall did at least as well on Election Day as they had done in early voting. I assumed there was a range of outcomes here, so I sorted the data by Abbott’s Ratio, to see where he did best and worst – relatively speaking – on Election Day. Here are a few counties of interest for each. First, where he improved on Election Day:


County                Abbott     Beto  Others
=============================================
Travis Early          24.07%   74.83%   1.10%
Travis E-Day          30.52%   66.96%   2.52%

Bastrop Early         53.93%   44.58%   1.50%
Bastrop E-Day         64.15%   33.53%   2.32%

Williamson Early      47.73%   50.94%   1.33%
Williamson E-Day      54.19%   43.20%   2.62%

Hays Early            42.52%   56.01%   1.46%
Hays E-Day            46.87%   50.30%   2.84%

Bowie Early           73.12%   25.96%   0.92%
Bowie E-Day           80.32%   18.17%   1.52%

Dallas Early          34.85%   64.18%   0.97%
Dallas E-Day          38.08%   60.02%   1.90%

There are numerous small counties in there that I haven’t listed, I’m just highlighting the ones of interest. Travis County was in fact the top Ratio value for Greg Abbott – he did 29% better on Election Day than he did in early voting. This is where I point out that “doing better (or worse) on Election Day” is not the same as doing well (or poorly). That said, Abbott did well enough on Election Day in Williamson County to nudge past Beto’s vote total for that county. Now here are a few where Abbott dropped off on Election Day:


County                Abbott     Beto  Others
=============================================
Fort Bend Early       47.58%   51.07%   1.35%
Fort Bend E-Day       44.72%   52.94%   2.33%

Lubbock Early         70.30%   28.64%   1.06%
Lubbock E-Day         67.54%   30.49%   1.97%

Harris Early          45.06%   53.79%   1.15%
Harris E-Day          43.31%   54.45%   2.24%

Gregg Early           73.76%   25.52%   0.72%
Gregg E-Day           71.09%   27.35%   1.56%

Jefferson Early       56.56%   42.33%   1.10%
Jefferson E-Day       54.61%   43.38%   2.01%

It’s interesting to me to see Central Texas counties filling up that first table, while the Houston area is more present in the second one. I could have included Waller, Wharton, and Chambers in the latter as well. Whether that’s a fluke or a tendency, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s finding weird things like this that makes doing this kind of exercise so much fun.

Does any of this matter on a more macro level? Again, I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t think it matters that much, in the sense that the votes all count the same and from the perspective of a campaign’s win number it doesn’t make a difference. It’s certainly nice to have a bunch of votes banked before Election Day – if nothing else, it mitigates some risk from bad weather and technical difficulties at voting locations. But ultimately, either your voters show up in the numbers you need or they don’t. I think this data is interesting, and it may suggest some strategies for how better to deploy campaign resources. Beyond that, it’s what you make of it.

DaSean Jones wins after provisional and cured mail ballots are counted

Nov 20th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

I’m sure someone is going to throw a fit over this.

Judge DaSean Jones

The Harris County felony judge race for the 180th criminal state district court flipped Friday night in favor of incumbent DaSean Jones after new mail and provisional ballots were counted.

Jones, who assumed office in 2019, has taken a 449-vote lead over Republican Tami Pierce. Pierce led by more than 1,200 votes the morning following the election. That number dwindled to 165 votes on Nov. 10.

Nearly 5,300 new ballots were counted in the latest update by Harris County Elections — including a little under 1,000 mail, nearly 1,800 early provisional and about 2,500 E-Day provisional.

[…]

According to Harris County Elections, the results posted Friday are the “final unofficial posting” before Tuesday when Harris County Commissioners Court is scheduled to canvass the results. The Elections office is still working on the reconciliation form.

See here, when I published the previous count, which was as of November 10 at 2:42 PM. Those were the last results before provisional votes were counted – as we know, those always take a few days for review. With the new restrictions on mail ballots, the same law that added those restrictions also allows for mail ballots that have a defect in them, such as lacking the correct ID number (drivers license number or last four digits of the SSN, depending on which you used to register with), to be corrected up to six days after the election, as noted by the Secretary of State. I presume that means up through Monday the 14th, I haven’t checked to see what the exact specification in the law is.

Be that as it may, here’s the November 10 report, which as noted had no provisional ballots and still some uncounted mail ballots. At that time, a total of 60,302 mail ballots had been counted, and as we know they favored Democrats countywide. Beto was leading in mail ballots in that report 62.25% to 36.76% over Greg Abbott, a net of 15,151 votes, while Lina Hidalgo had a 60.26% to 39.65% (11,960 votes) advantage. DaSean Jones was up 31,382 (56.12%) to 24,541 (43.88%) as of the 10th.

In the report from the 18th, which included the final mail totals as well as the provisionals, Jones gained 259 net votes, going to a 31,914 to 24,814 lead. Counted provisional votes were sorted into those from Early Voting and those from Election Day. His opponent Tami Pierce netted five votes in the former, winning them 850 to 845, but Jones added another 360 to his margin by taking Election Day provisional votes 1,390 to 1,030.

Overall, the EV provisional votes had a slight Democratic lean – looking just at the judicial races, the Democratic share of the EV provisionals was generally a fraction of a point to a point higher than the overall early vote percent. Jones was one of three Democratic judicial candidates to not carry the EV provisionals – Genmayel Haynes, one of the four remaining Democrats who lost, and Tami Craft, who had the closest margin of victory among the Dems who won before Jones’ ascent, were the other two. Dems won the Election Day provisional vote by a much more solid margin, in the 57-60% range in the judicial races I looked at. That right there suggests to me that the Republican claims about voting location problems affecting them disproportionately are bogus.

For what it’s worth, Beto now has 54.03% of the vote in Harris County; my previous post with the 2022 update on how statewide results compared to Harris County is now out of date, which is a lesson I’ll learn for next time. Lina Hidalgo increased her lead to 1.67 percentage points, now 0.09 points bigger than her percentage margin from 2018 though her raw vote margin of 18,183 is still slightly less. The Democrat among the four who lost who came closest to winning is now Porsha Brown, who now trails Leslie Johnson 50.01% to 49.99%, a 267 vote margin. Final turnout is 1,107,390, or about 43.75% of registered voters.

The “less is more” option for improving Election Day

Nov 12th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

This deserves serious consideration.

Widespread problems with Harris County elections likely would be relieved if officials reduced the number of polling locations in favor of fewer sites that operate more efficiently, a Rice University researcher and some recent reports say.

“We do just fine with early voting,” said Robert Stein, a political scientist and fellow at the school’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. “We have all kinds of locations over 12 days and that count goes fine. Then, at the end of election night you have 900 people standing in line.”

That line, like plenty of others, is made up of frustrated voters who, despite Harris County offering 782 polling locations with roughly 11,000 voting machines, encounter confusion and delays as poll workers troubleshoot problems, wait for instructions or replacement equipment from election officials.

County Election Administrator Clifford Tatum, the county’s fifth person to oversee elections since 2018, said Wednesday that officials would assess and investigate problems with this week’s mid-term election once they have completed the final tally and verified election results.

“We will look at every polling location,” Tatum said.

[…]

Tuesday’s election and others in recent years indicate the way to a smoother day is to decrease the number of places where problems can occur by reducing where people can cast a vote, Stein said.

Stein, who has studied local elections for more than 40 years and spent the past decade examining turnout and voter habits, said numerous analyses have shown voters likely can be better served with larger, more efficiently operated polling locations strategic to where they can conveniently vote.

The benefit would be two-fold, Stein said.

First, poll workers could be better distributed on Election Day so issues can be triaged as they arise. Currently, a polling location with six workers can grind to a halt if a single machine goes down and all the workers are huddling to handle the problem. Larger facilities can operate more smoothly because some election officials can focus on specific issues, such as technology, while less tech-savvy poll workers maintain the operations and check voters in. Reducing locations also means polling sites would have more machines at their disposal.

All of those changes would allow better use of “queuing theory,” the same research stores use to sell people more items with fewer workers. Better management of lines has been shown to improve not only the time voters spend in line, but their confidence in elections and likelihood to vote, according to a study jointly managed by Caltech and MIT.

Fewer polling places also would reduce the number of voting machines that need to be brought to a central counting location, verified, certified and uploaded, which should speed up the counting process.

Stein said more study is needed to calculate exactly how many polling locations are the correct amount for Harris County, and where they should be located, but it is likely a more efficient election could be conducted with hundreds of fewer sites.

Harris County already had trimmed the number of polling places this year, mostly because of a new state law requiring all votes be backed up with a paper ballot, that meant the county had to purchase and train scores of election volunteers on new machines. In 2020, the last major election — held during the COVID-19 pandemic — election officials offered 122 locations for the 12 days of early voting and 807 on Election Day.

[…]

The challenge to reducing polling locations in the Houston area, however, is politics of the most local level. Opposition to reducing the number of polling stations, historically, has been widespread because of fears it would disenfranchise low-income Black and Latino voters by removing neighborhood-centric sites and force suburban — often Republican — voters to drive farther to cast a ballot.

Most voters, however, do not vote in their neighborhood precincts, studies and the recent election show. Of the 1.1 million ballots cast in Harris County this cycle, nearly 700,000 were completed at 99 locations during early voting. Another 61,000 ballots were submitted by mail.

That leaves the approximately 350,000 people who voted Tuesday, many of whom crowded into major locations such as the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center on Gray Street, Trini Mendenhall Community Center and Jersey Village Municipal Government Center, all of which acted as early voting and Election Day sites.

Election officials could not produce a detailed list of where people voted Tuesday, citing the work they doing to finalize the election, but early voting indicates — as Stein said research also suggests — people vote where it is convenient for them but not necessarily closest.

Stein compared election locations to Starbucks, where someone’s habits may change but center on the most convenient choice. It may not be the closest one, he said, but it is the one on their way to work or while running errands.

“I can go back in time and model it,” Stein said. “You have got to know exactly where every voter is going to vote and you can get close with it. Is it perfect? No, but you can get pretty close.”

Additionally, local officials can leverage other options to easily connect people with polls. Metropolitan Transit Authority already offers free rides to polls through early voting and on Election Day, for example.

Early voting indicates voters already are finding their way to the most convenient places. Despite the 99 early voting locations being chosen to cover most of the county, the locations visited by the most voters are those located in major hubs for shopping or business, or where high concentrations of people pass by on their daily commutes. As a result, 50 of the locations handled 537,471 of the voters, while the other 49 saw 155,007 voters.

I feel like we had a version of this debate when the idea of voting centers was first proposed for Harris County. People at the time were very attached to the idea of voting in their neighborhood, and that’s understandable. Black and Hispanic communities have fought for generations for access to the ballot box, and being able to vote in their neighborhoods was both a symbol of their victory and an activity that had a lot of meaning. The fear that they would not be able to do that and would have to go someplace unfamiliar, possibly unwelcoming, and possibly inaccessible to some, was legitimate and a real reason to be wary if not opposed to the concept.

I believe that is different now, mostly because early voting is so popular and because voting at any location on Election Day is no longer new and unknown. The reason we have nearly as many Election Day locations where anyone can cast a vote as we did precinct locations where you could only vote at the one where you lived is basically the compromise that allowed for this hybrid version of voting centers to be initiated. The idea was always to consolidate voting locations on Election Day. It really does make sense and should eliminate a lot of the issues that caused delays, as Stein lays out in the story. And now that people are much more acclimated to the idea of voting wherever on Election Day, not to mention the fact that far fewer people wait until Election Day to vote, I would think moving towards that original vision, coupled with a plan and a promise to make both the voting experience and the vote-counting experience smoother and simpler and less time-consuming, ought to work. It’s absolutely worth a try. Campos and Stace have more.

Omnibus 2022 election results post

Nov 9th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

13 comments

It’s already midnight as I start writing this. I’m just going to do the highlights with the best information I have at this time.

– Nationally, Dems are doing pretty well, all things considered. As of this writing, Dems had picked up the Pennsylvania Senate seat and they were leading in Georgia and Arizona. They held on in a bunch of close House races. The GOP is still expected to have a majority in the House, but not by much. The Senate remains very close.

– Some tweets to sum up the national scene:

My best guess is 220R-215D, but uh…yeah, some wide error bands there.

— Lakshya Jain (@lxeagle17) 11:30 PM – 08 November 2022

Our estimate is that the GOP has a 73% chance to win. That’s not very different from the beginning of the night.
But the nature of this chance is very different.
Here’s an analogy

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) 11:32 PM – 08 November 2022

(it’s the 4th quarter in the second half of this analogy, btw)

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) 11:32 PM – 08 November 2022

– On that score, Republicans appear to have picked up CD15, which they drew to be slightly red, while the Dems took back CD34. Henry Cuellar is still with us, holding onto CD28.

– Statewide, well. It just wasn’t to be. The running tallies on the SOS Election Result site are a bit skewed as many smaller red counties have their full results in while the big urban counties have mostly just the early votes counted. Heck, they didn’t even have Harris County early results there until after 10:30 PM (the point at which I went and snoozed on the couch for an hour because I was driving myself crazy). It will be a ten-point or more win for Abbott, I just can’t say yet what. A survey of some county results early on suggested Beto was around where he’d been percentage-wise in most of the big counties (Tarrant, where he was a few points behind, being an exception) but was going to need some decent Election Day numbers to approach his raw vote margins. He didn’t do as well as he had done in 2018 in some of the larger suburban counties like Collin and Denton and didn’t do as well in South Texas.

– He also didn’t do as well in Harris, which made for some close races and a few Republican judicial candidates with early leads. A couple of those had eroded by the 11:30 addition of more Election Day and mail ballots, but we might see a few Republican judges on the bench next year. As of that 11:30 PM vote dump, Beto was leading Harris County by nine points, well short of where he had been in 2018.

– But as of this time, and with the proviso that I don’t know which voting centers have reported and which are still out, the Harris County Democratic delegation was all ahead, though not be a lot. This includes Lesley Briones for County Commissioner, which if it all holds would give Dems the 4-1 margin on Commissioners Court that they sought. There are still a lot of votes to be counted as I type this.

– Going back to the state races, Republicans may pick up a seat or two in the Lege. HD37 was leaning their way, and they may hold onto HD118. Dems were leading in HDs 70 (by a little) and 92 (by a more comfortable amount), two seats that had been drawn to siphon off Dem voters in formerly red areas. As of this writing, the open SD27 (Eddie Lucio’s former fiefdom) was super close but all of the remaining votes were from Hidalgo County, where Dem Morgan LaMantia had a good lead in early voting. That one will likely be a hold for Dems. On the other hand, SBOE2 was leaning Republican, so Dems may be back to only five members on the SBOE.

– There were of course some technical issues.

Tight races in Harris County, where around 1 million votes will be tallied, could hinge on whether ballots cast after 7 p.m. will be included in the count, after an Election Day filled with glitches and uncertainty for voters and poll workers alike.

Harris County District Court Judge Dawn Rogers signed an order keeping all county voting sites open until 8 p.m., only to have the Texas Supreme Court stay her order just in time to create confusion at voting locations letting voters arrive late.

In a three-sentence order, the court said voting “should occur only as permitted by Texas Election Code.” The high court also ruled that votes cast in the final hour should be segregated. That means those votes can’t be counted until the court issues a final ruling.

That ruling could be critical in the event that certain county races, including the hard-fought battle for county judge between Democratic incumbent Lina Hidalgo and Republican challenger Alexandra del Moral Mealer, are close enough to be decided by those set-aside votes.

“Every single vote counts,” said Laila Khalili, a director at the voter engagement group Houston in Action. “Some elections can be won by just a couple of votes.”

Khalili watched a handful of voters file provisional ballots at the Moody Park voting location.

The request to keep the polling sites open late was made by the Texas Organizing Project, Texas Civil Rights Project and ACLU of Texas, citing what they said were late election location openings and poor planning that disenfranchised some voters.

“These delays have forced countless voters to leave polling places without being able to vote,” the groups said.

Harris County was unable to estimate or confirm how many votes were cast after the typical 7 p.m. cutoff that allows for anyone in line by that time to cast a ballot.

Voters who arrived between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. cast a provisional ballot, according to the county attorney’s office. Some voters, later in the evening, complained that election workers even denied them that option, as the Supreme Court stay was broadcast to the 782 polling locations.

There were some issues with temporarily running out of paper at some locations and some long lines at others. We’ll just have to see how many provisional votes there are.

– Finally, for now, all of the county and city bond issues were passing. The closest ones as of this time were city of Houston prop E, up by eight points, and Harris County prop A, up by 11.

I’m going to hit Publish on this now and go to bed. I’ll make updates in the morning, either here or in a new post.

UPDATE: It’s 2:30 and I never actually got to sleep. With 334 of 782 voting centers reporting, Dems have gained some more ground in Harris County. Beto leads by nine points, while Judge Hidalgo is up by almost two full points and over 15K votes. She has led each aspect of voting. A couple of Dem judges who trailed early on are now leading, with a couple more in striking distance. There will be some Republican judges next year barring something very unexpected, but the losses are modest. All things considered, and again while acknowledging there are still a lot of votes out there, not too bad.

UPDATE:

A new batch of #ElectionDay results for #HarrisCounty are in and have been posted.
👉 View the results at https://bit.ly/3G0ETsV
👉 All Polls have been Received and Certified and 774 have been Tabulated.
#YourVoteYourVoice #HarrisVotes

— Harris County Elections (@HarrisVotes) 05:11 AM – 09 November 2022

An email with the summary file hit my inbox at 4:51 AM. Democrats officially have a 4-1 majority on Harris County Commissioners Court. By my count, Republicans won five judicial races in Harris County.

Fewer mail ballots rejected in November

Nov 7th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Good, but still could be better.

Local election officials in Texas are reporting a drop in the percentage of mail ballots that have so far been flagged for rejection during the ongoing midterm elections, as compared with a spike earlier this year.

During the state’s primary in March, state officials said 24,636 mail-in ballots were rejected in that election. That’s a 12.38% rejection rate — far higher than in previous contests. According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Texas’ mail ballot rejection rate during the 2020 general election was 0.8% and it was 1.5% in 2018.

The surge in the rejection rate in March followed a voting law passed by Republicans in the state legislature in 2021 that created new ID requirements for mail ballots. Local officials said confusion created by the law, known as Senate Bill 1, tripped up many voters. In many cases, voters completely missed the field on the ballot return envelope that requires either a partial Social Security number or driver’s license number.

According to the Texas secretary of state’s office, however, the ongoing general election isn’t experiencing the same high rate of ballot rejections so far.

State officials have reported that 1.78% of mail ballots returned to county election officials have been rejected so far — 8,771 ballots out of 491,399, as of Friday afternoon.

About 314,000 ballots still had to be processed by local officials, according to the secretary of state. Voters have until Election Day on Tuesday to turn in mail ballots.

Many ballots that have been flagged for rejection will be remedied before voting ends next week, because SB 1 also created a ballot cure process in Texas. That means voters will have an opportunity to fix their mistakes.

Sam Taylor, assistant secretary of state for communications, attributes the decrease in the mail ballot rejection rate to updates to the return ballot in some Texas counties, as well as additional voter information included in mail ballots by local officials.

He says various voter education campaigns following the March primary have also helped. Taylor said his office, along with county election officials, focused on educating older voters in the state about new ID requirements. In Texas, voters over 65, voters with disabilities, people out of town and people in jail but not convicted can cast a mail ballot.

Taylor also said rejection rates were always likely to improve as “voters got used to” the new mail ballot process.

“I think it is moving in the right direction and more education never hurts,” he said.

Harris County — which is home to Houston, and is the state’s most populous and diverse county — so far has a higher rejection rate than the state average.

According to Harris County officials, about 9% of returned mail ballots were flagged with a rejection or exception code, as of Wednesday. Officials said most of those preliminary ballots were flagged specifically with ID issues, which are a result of the state’s new voting law.

We’ve discussed this before, and I’ve been generally optimistic that the downward trend we saw from May would continue. I give a lot of credit to county election administrators, who have worked very hard to mitigate the problem. What all of this tells me is that yes this will continue to improve over time, and that the fact that this was imposed for the primaries without giving the counties or the SOS the chance to figure it out and develop training and communication materials just shows how little the Republicans in the Lege cared about disenfranchising people. They were willing to do the beta test in real time without there ever having been any dry runs, and too bad for anyone affected. Not much we can do about it now, but never forget the attitude.

As for the Harris County figure, I can’t find any other information at this time. I do hope that these are the correctible kind of error and that the final rejection totals will be lower. For what it’s worth, these are the totals through the end of early voting for elections from 2012 for the percentage of mail ballots accepted:


Year    Mailed   Counted   Pct
==============================
2012    92,290    66,310  71.8
2014    89,073    67,967  76.3
2016   123,999    94,699  76.4
2018   119,742    89,098  74.4
2020   250,434   170,410  68.0
2022    80,416    57,871  72.0

This is mail ballots that have been accepted and counted, which are listed as Returned on the daily total files. The large majority of other ones are those that weren’t returned, but some of them were returned and rejected for whatever the reason. The point here is that we don’t have an abnormally low number of returned and counted ballots. So unless the accounting for this has changed, it looks pretty normal. We’ll know more after the election, but this is reassuring. Did you vote yet?

Final November 2022 EV totals: Catching up

Nov 6th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

First, some slightly outdated numbers from the Chron.

Fewer Harris County voters cast ballots during this year’s early voting period than in the 2020 and 2018 elections, according to unofficial voter counts released after polls closed on Friday night.

From Oct. 24 to Nov. 4, about 736,000 people had voted at Harris County’s 99 early voting locations. They accounted for about 28 percent of Harris County’s 2.6 million registered voters.

Local voters are taking to the polls to elect dozens of local offices, including Harris County judge, as well as to vote on $1.2 billion in bond proposals and on statewide races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and others.

But so far, the number of voters has lagged behind the turnout in recent November elections.

In 2020, which was a presidential election year, more than 1.4 million people, about 57 percent of registered voters in Harris County, voted early. In 2018, early voting turnout was 855,711 people or 36.6 percent of registered voters.

There was an uptick in recent days of voter turnout. On Friday, more than 95,000 people voted in person, the highest daily total during the two-week early voting period. The second-highest voting day was Thursday, when more than 75,000 people voted. Long lines and waits of more than 2 hours were reported at some locations on Friday. After polls closed at 7 p.m., there were still 200 people in line to vote at some locations, including NRG Stadium, according to the Harris County Election Administrator’s Office.

I’ll get to the numbers in a minutes, but this story has a publication time of 9:14 PM and refers to a tweet posted at 7 PM by the Elections office. The final in person vote count for Friday was actually 105K, so waiting till later to publish (the voters file with the final count hit my mailbox at 11:24 PM) might have been advisable. Be that as it may, this is what we got when all was said and done. Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The final totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   67,967  307,280  375,247
2018   89,098  766,613  855,711
2022   57,871  692,478  750,349

In the end, early turnout for 2022 was 87.7% of what it was in 2018, while in person turnout was 91.6% of the 2018 number. That’s down, but as noted on Friday, the gap has narrowed. All three final days of early voting had higher in person totals this year than in 2022. Comparisons to 2020 are not particularly interesting – this is a non-Presidential year, and in case you forgot there were three weeks of early voting in 2020, thanks to the pandemic. We may be hard pressed to match 2020 EV totals in 2024.

The question is, what might final turnout look like? The trend in Presidential years is that fewer votes are cast on Election Day. In 2012, 35% of votes were cast on Election Day, in 2016 it was 26% of the vote, and in 2020 – again, in a year with three weeks of early voting, and also a record number of votes by mail – just 12% of the vote was on Tuesday. That trend is much less pronounced in off years. In 2010, 44% of all votes were cast on Election Day, in 2014 it was 45%, and in 2018 it was 29%.

What that means is that if Election Day in 2022 is like it was in 2018, we’ll get about 307K votes cast (*) for a final total of about 1.057 million. If it’s more like 2014, we’ll see 614K votes cast, for 1.364 million total. Going by the estimate of about 2.53 million total voters in Harris County, that would be 41.8% turnout of registered voters on the low end, and 53.9% on the high end. That compares to 41.7% in 2010, 33.7% in 2014, and 52.9% in 2018.

My high end scenario, in other words, would mean that 2022 exceeds 2018 both in absolute numbers as well as in turnout percentage. That feels a bit exuberant to me, but not out of the question. I think the 29% turnout on Election Day is probably too low – I’ll get into that more in a minute – so let’s split the difference and say 37% of the vote happens on Tuesday. If that’s the case, then 1.191 million votes will be cast, or 47.1% turnout. That’s down from 2018 but not by much. It feels plausible to me, with the proviso that we’re all just flat-out guessing here.

One argument for why we might get a larger portion of the vote cast on Tuesday than we had in 2018 is that more voters came out in the final days of early voting this year. The last three days of early voting in 2018 accounted for about 27% of the final in person early vote total. This year, about 35% of the in person vote came out on the last three days. That at least suggests the possibility that more people are taking their time to get to the polls. Does that necessarily carry over to voting on E-Day instead of voting early? Maybe, I don’t know. We’re dealing with the tiniest possible sample sizes here, so you can read anything you want into this stuff. That’s why I try to talk in terms of ranges of possibility. Different years are, well, different. It’s plausible to me that the Election Day share of the vote this year could be higher than it was in 2018, but that doesn’t mean it will be, nor does it mean that if it is it will be as much as it was in previous years. Pick your adventure here. Have you voted yet?

(*) – Just a reminder that some number of mail ballots come in between Friday and Tuesday, which means that the mail totals you see on the official Election Night returns don’t match what I’ve got here from the daily EV tallies. In 2018, there wound up being just over 100K mail ballots, which means there were another 11K that came in after the “final” totals posted above. My guess is we’ll get between 65-67K total mail ballots this year. All this means that my calculations for the Election Day vote share are slightly off, but it’s not worth worrying about. The basic contour is still whether we get an Election Day more like 2018 or more like 2014/2010.

November 2022 Day Ten EV totals: Two to go

Nov 4th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

This is the data from Wednesday. It came in a little later than usual. Since yesterday was the vote-till-10PM day, I thought I’d provide this update now, and will give the final EV totals on Sunday. Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day Ten totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   63,857  220,505  284,362
2018   82,009  605,869  719,878
2022   52,608  513,398  566,006

About 58K in person voters Wednesday, which was in line with the dailies from week one, plus another 6K mail ballots. The second Wednesday of week two early voting in 201 had a weird dip, to 48K in person votes – maybe it rained all day that day, I dunno – so the gap between 2018 and 2022 was slightly closed. About 122K in person votes over the last two days will make the 2022 early vote exceed the entire total from 2014. We won’t catch up to 2018 barring a huge surge, but closing the gap a bit more is possible. Have you voted yet?

November 2022 Day Nine EV Totals: Still lagging

Nov 2nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Nine days down, three to go: Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day Nine totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   60,400  191,432  251,832
2018   80,279  557,264  637,543
2022   46,417  454,309  500,726

Not off to a fast start in week 2, as both Monday and Tuesday had lower turnout than the weekdays of Week 1. I wasn’t expecting 2018-level turnout, even with the larger number of registered voters, but it’s lagging farther behind than I expected at this point. I’d like to see this turn around, but we’re running out of time for it to happen. Have you voted yet?

November 2022 Day Seven EV totals: On to Week 2

Oct 31st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Fresh from Sunday night: Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day Seven totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   57,546  137,137  194,683
2018   77,347  429,009  506,356
2022   44,163  354,100  398,263

Saturday’s in person total of 41K was surprisingly low, while Sunday’s 25K was much more in line with expectations. Because Saturday in 2018 was much busier, the 2022 pace has fallen off a bit, though the in person total is still about 82.5% of what it was four years ago. The early vote for 2022 after seven days has now exceeded the entire early vote from 2014. An average of about 59K per day for this week, not much higher than the average for the first seven days, would make the 2022 early total be greater than the final turnout for all of 2014. Obviously, we want to aim much higher than that, and we have many more voters now than we did eight years ago – and also four years ago. We’ll see what this week holds. Have you voted yet?

November 2022 Day Five EV totals: A closer look at mail ballots

Oct 29th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

The numbers are what they are.

Nearly half as many people have so far voted by mail in Harris County as in 2018 during the same period, state data show.

About 31,000 voters submitted mail-in ballots by the end of the day Thursday, compared with 56,000 at this point four years ago. A similar trend is taking shape at the statewide level, where Republican voters who previously relied on mail ballots are likely opting to vote in person early or on Election Day, political analysts say.

Overall, turnout during early voting has also trailed slightly behind 2018. In the 30 counties with the most registered voters, about 11.1 percent have cast a ballot so far, though four counties had not yet submitted updated tallies as of Friday morning. About 16.1 percent had voted by this time four years ago.

The 31,000 mail ballots in Harris County make up about 1.2 percent of its registered voters. But in 2018, about 2.4 percent of registered voters’ ballots had been shipped off and counted by now.

Republicans in the past have had a 2-to-1 advantage in the vote-by-mail category, and the practice expanded in the 2020 election as the coronavirus spread. But as the pandemic waned, and after former President Donald Trump cast doubt on the integrity of the method, data shows Democrats now have the edge.

“Prior to 2018, voting by mail was really the bread and butter for Republican candidates,” said Derek Ryan, a GOP strategist whose company produces election data analyses. “And then (Trump) started discussing how potentially unsafe voting by mail could be, and I think that message has resonated with the Republican base.”

As of Wednesday in Harris County, 52 percent had previously voted in a Democratic primary, and 36 percent of mail voters had previously voted in a Republican primary, according to Ryan’s analysis. Yet, Republican voters have the upper hand in person, 41 percent to 34 percent.

[…]

Ryan, who’s been involved in politics in Texas since 2000, said this is the first election cycle he can remember in which most Republican candidates have not sent out mail ballot applications to registered voters.

Harris County elections spokeswoman Leah Shah said the county received far fewer applications that came from campaigns in this election — about 27,000 compared to 57,000 in 2018. Overall, the county received about 78,000 applications, compared with nearly 120,000 in 2018, she said.

“We’ve done a significant amount of education through the summer to ensure people feel confident in voting by mail,” Shah said. “It’s still an extremely important option for people who can’t come in person. We certainly want to encourage people to do so if needed and if they’re eligible.”

As noted, the in person early voting totals for Harris County right now are quite close to the 2018 numbers. The vote by mail totals are down quite a bit, and for sure that’s mostly Republican dropoff. For what it’s worth, in the 2018 general election in Harris County, Republicans had a slight lead in straight ticket votes on the mail ballots, though the Dem candidates for the most part had a modest edge overall. In 2020 Dems had a solid lead i mail votes, and I expect the same this year though with a smaller number of total mail votes cast. In the end, as I’ve said before, I would expect most of the former mail voters to turn out in person.

As for the Republican voters having an edge so far with in person voters, remember three things: One, the earliest voters tend to be the most faithful ones, so they’re disproportionately the strongest partisans. Two, going back to 2012 there have generally been more votes cast in Republican primaries than in Democratic primaries. The high water total for both parties in a primary is about 329K, with Dems hitting that mark in 2020 and Republicans in 2016. Not everyone votes in a given year’s primary so you can’t just add up the votes for each year, but my point is that to a first order approximation, the total number of people with an R primary history and the people with a D voting history are roughly the same.

(Yes, there were 410K Dem primary voters in 2008. That was 14 years ago. People move, people die, and we have about 700K more registered voters now in Harris County than we did then.)

Finally, there are a lot of people with no primary voting history. In 2018, when Dems had 159K primary voters and Republicans had 167K, every Dem other than Lina Hidalgo got at least 606K votes in November, while Republicans of the non-Ed Emmett variety got at most 560K (Hidalgo beat Emmett 595K to 575K). In 2020, with 329K Dem primary votes and 195K Republicans, it was at least 814K votes for Dems and at most 740K for Republicans. There are a lot of votes still to be cast.

Here are the totals through Friday. Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day Five totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   54,300  104,147  158,447
2018   65,232  315,030  380,262
2022   37,810  287,185  324,995

There were about 55K in person voters on both Thursday and Friday. Given the rains on Friday, it’s possible that total might have been higher otherwise. The 2022 in person tally continues to run at a bit more than 90% of the 2018 total (91.2%, if you want to be more precise), while the mail ballot total is about 80% of what it was in 2018. A simple and dumb extrapolation would suggest about 698K in person early voters plus 52K mail voters for a total of 750K, compared to 855K in 2018. I still think we wind up closer than that. The Trib has a nice daily tracker that as of last night was updated through Thursday, if you want to follow that along. I’ll post the next update Monday morning.

November 2022 Day Three EV totals: A lot like Day Two

Oct 27th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Sorry, the days are long and my mind is full and I don’t have anything interesting to say. I will at some point. For now, this is what we get. Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day Three totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   46,293   61,150  107,443
2018   55,506  190,455  245,961
2022   28,536  176,964  205,500

There were 56K in person voters yesterday, and a bit over 4K returned mail ballots. At this point, 2022 is running about twice as high as 2014, and that gap will grow, while at about 80% of 2018 overall but more than 90% of 2018 in person. The 2018 dailies stay pretty flat though the last day, with an odd dip on the second Wednesday. I think 2022 will catch up, at least for the in person totals. Have you voted yet?

November 2022 Day Two EV totals: Just the facts

Oct 26th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I’m just going to get into it, I don’t have anything to add to the numbers. Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day Two totals for 2022 are here.


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   42,752   40,595   83,347
2018   53,947  127,963  181,910
2022   23,630  120,402  144,032

There were about 59K in person voters yesterday, compared to 63K for 2018. Obviously, the overall mail ballot total is down as noted before, but in the end I expect those votes to mostly show up as in person votes. I’m sure I’ll have more to say going forward, but for now we’re up to date.

November 2022 Day One EV totals: The in person experience

Oct 25th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Here’s your Chron story about Day One of early voting.

More than 60,000 registered voters Harris County decided Monday they couldn’t wait any longer to cast a ballot for their choices in the 2022 midterm election.

Monday was the first day of early voting in Texas, and more than one out of every 50 Harris County turned out to cast their ballots, according to the Harris County Elections Administration office. Voters this year are casting votes for Texas governor and Harris County judge, along with dozens of other state and local races. In Harris County, a printed-out ballot would be 20 pages long, officials said

Few problems were reported at the county’s 99 early voting locations Monday, but voters did find themselves standing in line waiting to cast their votes.

[…]

Texas now has nearly 17.7 million voters, which is 1.9 million more than four years ago, according to the Texas Division of Elections.

Harris County alone has about 2.6 million registered voters. Since 2018, about 230,000 people have been added to the rolls in Texas’ most populous county.

Most people across the state are expected to vote early, which has been the trend for Texas elections since 2008.

Whether this year’s midterm will have record turnouts remained to be seen. Elections officials in the largest counties outside of Harris County said turnout appeared to be slightly lower on the first day of early voting, compared to the 2020 and 2018 elections.

Here’s the story about voter registration totals, which I’ll get into separately. You’re here for the daily EV totals, and I aim to please:


Year     Mail    Early    Total
===============================
2014   41,520   20,215   61,735
2018   52,413   63,188  115,601
2022   21,779   60,834   82,613

I’m just focusing on midterm elections this time. The third week of early voting in 2020 makes any comparisons there hard to do. Final EV totals from 2018 are here and from 2014 are here. The Day One totals for 2022 are here.

Two things to note. One is that the mail ballots are way down, not just from 2018 but also from 2014. I saw some speculation about this on Twitter, as statewide mail ballots are also way down, that it’s mostly Republicans giving up on voting by mail due to the constant brainwashing about it by their lord and master The Former Guy. We can’t be sure about that, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis. We’ll know for sure when the votes get tallied. I’d guess that some number of other mail voters have also decided just to vote in person and not mess with that hassle now.

Two, the in person total for today is pretty close to what we had in 2018. Remember how much we freaked out about the turnout that year? I suspect in the end we’ll be pretty close, and may very well surpass it. Remember, we have a lot more voters now, so for a similar percentage of turnout the absolute total will be higher, and I also think we may have more Election Day voting, with probably more Republicans waiting till then. I’ll feel better about making pronouncements after a few days of actual voting.

I will try to post these daily, but may fall a day behind depending on how busy my evenings are. For now, this is where it is. Have you voted yet?

Early voting starts today for the November 2022 election

Oct 24th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

8 comments

If you feel like this election has been going on since approximately the Clinton administration, I feel you. We are officially in the home stretch now, as early voting begins today. All the information you need for Harris County is here. The basic schedule:

October 24, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
October 25, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
October 26, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
October 27, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
October 28, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
October 29, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
October 30, 2022 — 12PM – 7PM
October 31, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
November 1, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
November 2, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
November 3, 2022 — 7AM – 10PM
November 4, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM
Election Day
November 8, 2022 — 7AM – 7PM

The voting locations are here, or here if you prefer an alphabetical listing. Note that there are always some changes from previous elections. The West End Multi-Service Center on Heights Blvd, which I had been using lately, is no longer there but the Damascus Baptist Church Fellowship Hall, on Center Street near Studemont, has subbed in, and that’s just about as convenient for me. Look before you go, check to see how long the lines are, and get out there to vote. I’ll be keeping an eye on the totals as we proceed. The Trib has more.

Voting has already started for 2022

Sep 27th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Military voters are getting their ballots now.

Voting in the Texas governor’s race is officially underway.

While in-person early voting is still four weeks away, Texans on military bases around the U.S. and overseas are getting their ballots as part of a nationwide push to help give service members more time to get their ballots returned and counted.

About 8,000 ballots already have been sent out statewide, with up to 30,000 potentially going out over the next few weeks if it follows the trends of past election cycles.

Nationwide, federal officials have been pushing states to move more quickly to get ballots out for deployed soldiers and overseas voters. Historically, those ballots get rejected at a much higher rate than other vote-by-mail ballots largely because many of them just don’t make it back to Texas in time.

The Department of Defense has put more effort into outreach to soldiers through voter assistance offices set up at military bases across the nation. Even ships at sea have a designated voting assistance officer onboard to help get ballots filled and sent back in time to count.

That’s a big change from decades ago. In 2006, nationwide, 1 million ballots were sent out to people in the military and overseas, but just one-third of those ended up being counted.

Congress responded in 2009 with new laws requiring all local election officials to get requested military ballots out to soldiers domestically and overseas 45 days before an election. This year, that meant ballots had to be out by Saturday.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a fairly small number of votes. But every vote matters, and I hope we all agree that we should make some effort to accommodate active military personnel. And if you’re out there casting doubt on the legitimacy of mail ballots, these are among them. So show some respect, and show it to all voters.

The continued Republican threat to voting

Jul 5th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

They cannot be satisfied.

Not satisfied with the new voting restrictions put in place less than a year ago, the Texas Republican Party is plowing ahead with yet new measures that would reduce the number of early voting days and end the practice of allowing any senior to vote by mail without an excuse.

At the same time, party leaders are threatening GOP state lawmakers who control the Texas Legislature with increased sanctions if they don’t support the platform, including potentially spending tens of thousands of dollars directly to oppose them in future primaries.

“We made a good step the last time, but we are not there yet,” State Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from Edgewood, said about last year’s election reforms packages that reduced early voting hours in places like Harris County and put new restrictions on mail-in voting.

The push to further restrict early voting and mail-in ballots is rooted in former President Donald Trump’s continued claim without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him largely because of mail-in balloting. At the same convention where the state GOP adopted the new legislative priorities, more than 8,000 delegates also approved a resolution rejecting the “certified results of the 2020 Presidential election” and declaring “that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”

“Texas Republicans rightly have no faith in the 2020 election results and we don’t care how many times the elites tell us we have to,” said Republican Party of Texas Chairman Matt Rinaldi, who was elected the leader of the party with no opposition.

What’s more, the Republican Party of Texas membership voted overwhelmingly at its statewide convention in June to make more election reforms its No. 1 priority for the next legislative session that begins in January. That would include increasing penalties for those who violate election laws even inadvertently, reducing early voting days and restricting mail-in balloting to only the military, the disabled and people who will be out of the county during the entirety of early voting.

Texas has allowed voters 65 and older to vote absentee without needing an excuse since 1975. If the GOP succeeds, that would end. More than 1 million Texans used vote-by-mail during the 2020 presidential election and more than 850,000 of those ballots came from people 65 and older, according to the Texas Division of Elections.

“There’s no reason, just because you’ve turned 65, that you can’t show up to vote,” Hall said in promoting the changes during the June GOP Convention in Houston.

[…]

Texas was a pioneer of in-person early voting. It created a 20-day window of early voting in the late 1980s and expanded it dramatically in the early 1990s to include more locations like shopping malls and grocery stores. Currently, Texas has two weeks of early voting before elections, though in 2020 Gov. Greg Abbott expanded early voting for an additional week to allow more people concerned about COVID-19 to vote before Election Day.

If the state cut early voting to just one week, as Hall has proposed, it would affect up to 6.5 million Texans — that’s how many voted in the first two weeks in 2020.

Look, there’s no point in deploying things like “logic” to point out that they seem to have no problems with the elections that they won, or that doing this would hurt their voters, too. It doesn’t need to make sense. It also doesn’t matter whether the “regular” Republicans support this madness or not. Once it has a foothold, the momentum only goes in one direction. Either we win enough power to hold them off, or we are left with nothing but the hope that the likes of Bryan Hughes is unwilling to go that far.

Also of interest:

The Harris County Attorney’s office on Thursday said it is looking into allegations a grass-roots group knocked on doors in Sunnyside and attempted to get residents to sign affidavits verifying the identities of registered voters living at their addresses.

The county attorney’s probe is based on a complaint from at least one Sunnyside resident who said two men came to her home and asked questions they said were to confirm the identities of registered voters who live at that address. The men gave her an official-looking affidavit form and asked her to sign it attesting to the residents at the address “under penalty of perjury.”

“We are investigating this issue and exploring legal options to protect residents and prevent this from happening again,” the County Attorney’s office said in a statement, adding it is working closely with the Harris County Elections Administrator’s office to fully understand what happened.

In a Wednesday evening news release, the elections office warned residents against “scammers” it said pretended to be from the county elections and voter registration offices and attempted to collect sensitive personal information from voters.

The County Attorney’s office, however, said it had no information that anyone had attempted to misrepresent themselves as public employees, which would be illegal.

The two men, according to doorbell camera video footage recorded by a Sunnyside resident, wore badges identifying themselves as members of Texas Election Network, a conservative grass-roots organization formed in 2021.

[…]

In video footage recorded Sunday and reviewed by the Houston Chronicle Thursday, a man carrying the clipboard explains to the resident: “What they told us to do is get a yes or no to confirm whether everybody is here. If not, we’ll take the ones off that are not, and then they update their records.”

The Texas Election Network website — which has minimal information about the organization and does not disclose its leadership — lists five objectives, including clean voter rolls and fraud-free absentee ballots.

In its release, the county elections office said it does request the information being asked on the form used by men and added that voters are not required to sign them.

“In the event that the Harris County Elections Office ever needs to contact you directly, our staff will have county ID badges to prove their identity, and/or paperwork with the logo or official seal of the office included,” the release states.

James Slattery, senior staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said for the average voter, the organization’s name, badge and paperwork could convey a sense of an official visit by the government without explicitly doing so.

“I’m sure they’ll say they’re just a bland nonprofit, but to a voter who does not have a law degree, who does not have a background in law enforcement, you are a lot more likely to believe that this is some kind of quasi-official visit,” Slattery said.

“This is one of the precise situations I have been most worried about this election — people in shadowy volunteer groups who suggest in one way or another that they are acting under official authority questioning the eligibility of voters directly by knocking on their doors,” Slattery said.

I’m sure this group is totally on the up-and-up and will spend an equivalent amount of time canvassing in Baytown and Kingwood and the Villages.

So what’s going on in the CD34 special election?

Jun 9th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

We started with this.

Early voting continues for the June 14 special election for CD34 open (Lean R) through June 10. Candidates for that special election were required to file pre-special election reports today (Thurs.) if they meet the reporting thresholds. These reports disclose contributions received and expenditures made between April 1 and May 25.

Mayra Flores (R) out-raised former Cameron Co. Comm. Dan Sanchez (D), $734K to $46K, and outspent him, $754K to $42K. They each have just over $100K on hand. Sanchez has a $100K loan balance. Flores has raised $1.1M for the race so far including funds raised for the March 1 primary election, which she won outright with 60% of the vote.

Not great! Flores’ report is here, and Sanchez’s is here. Flores had raised $347K as of the April report, which means her combined total is now over a million, while Sanchez had not yet filed a report as of then as he had barely entered by that time. There’s now some national Democratic money in the race, which closes the gap a little, but not that much (Politico link via Daily Kos Elections).

Then we got this.

Early voting continues for the June 14 special election for CD34 open (Lean R) through Friday. As of yesterday (Mon.), just over 8K people – 2.1% of registered voters – have cast ballots early in person (78%) or by mail (22%). About three quarters of all early votes have been cast in Cameron Co., representing 2.7% of registered voters there. Those voters break down as follows:

49% also voted in the March 1 Democratic primary election (2,982 voters)

29% also voted in the Republican primary election (1,767 voters); and

22% did not vote in either party’s primary election (1,360 voters).

These numbers suggest Democrats Dan Sanchez and Rene Coronado could receive a majority of early votes combined. Republican candidates this cycle have tended to perform better among Election Day voters. The difference-makers will likely be non-primary voters who are motivated to cast ballots in a low-turnout election. Republican Mayra Flores and allied PACs have greatly outspent the Democrats so far, which could provide more motivation for those non-primary voters who lean Republican.

Democratic PACs are making a late, albeit significantly smaller, push this week. The House Majority PAC released a new Spanish-language ad, “Lawless,” which uses an endorsement from a gun rights group to tie Flores to images of the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

You can see the ad in question there. The next-biggest piece of the existing CD34 is in Hidalgo County, which was also comfortably Dem in 2020; it would be nice to know how it’s going there. I agree that a Sanchez-Flores runoff is the single most likely outcome here, and if that happens this race will surely get louder and more expensive. Whether Dems up their investment or not may depend on how next Tuesday turns out. Stay tuned. The Trib has more.

Early voting is underway in the HCC2 runoff

Jun 8th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Apparently, I missed the start of it, which was on Monday.

.
🚨 Polls are officially open for the June 18 Joint Runoff Election.
👉 Voters in HCCS District 2 and Nassau Bay are eligible to vote.
📍 View your unique sample ballot or find a polling location at http://HarrisVotes.com/PollLocations
#YourVoteYourVoice #HarrisVotes

— Harris County Elections (@HarrisVotes) 7:02 AM – 6 June 2022

See here for the background. Early voting will run through next Tuesday, June 14, having started this Monday the 6th. You can find locations here and the map here. Polls are open every day from 7 to 7 except for Sunday, when they will be open from 12 to 7. According to the daily EV report I got yesterday, 264 in person ballots have been cast so far, 84 of which were at the Nassau Bay location. That report doesn’t show any mail ballots being returned, but I have to assume that’s an error of some kind. Regardless, as I suggested before, this will be a very low turnout affair. If you live in HCC district 2, your vote counts for a whole lot.

2022 primary runoff Day Five EV report: Yes, I have some info about mail ballots

May 21st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Early voting has concluded for the primary runoffs. Here’s the final EV report, and here are the final totals:


Party    Mail   Early    Total
==============================
Dem    16,767  25,294   42,061
GOP    13,187  50,498   63,685

You can compare to Day Three. As is always the case, the last day was the busiest for in person voting. Republicans have already exceeded their runoff turnout from 2018, but they only had four races then, and only one of them was countywide, for a District Court position. The runoff in CD02 generated more than half of their total votes. Dems had a runoff for Governor, for all of the countywide executive positions, and for CD07. We will end up with more votes in this runoff than in 2018, though given the different nature of each, for each party, I don’t know how much it matters. I’ll put it to you this way: Dems had 35K turnout in the 2006 primary runoff, which was almost the same amount as the 2006 primary. Republicans drew all of 10K for their runoff, which consisted of one appellate court position and the open seat in HD133. You have to look past the topline numbers, because the races themselves matter.

Anyway. At a wild guess, I’d say Dems end up with 60-70K, Republicans with 85-100K. I’m told (because I asked) that mail ballot rejections were running at around 12% and trending slightly down after the initial batch. Still way too high, but at least it’s down from where we were in March. I’ll be on the lookout for totals from around the state. Have you voted yet?

2022 primary runoff Day Three EV report: Not quite as many mail ballots

May 19th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Let’s get right to it. Here is the Day Three EV report for the primary runoffs. Here are the vote totals through Wednesday:


Party    Mail   Early    Total
==============================
Dem    15,675  10,993   26,668
GOP    12,735  26,794   39,527

And as a reminder, here they were for Day One:


Party    Mail   Early    Total
==============================
Dem    20,357   3,050   23,407
GOP    20,735   8,049   28,782

You may be wondering, as was Campos and as was I, what happened with the mail ballot totals? I called the Election Office to ask. The short answer is that they accidentally combined the Dem and GOP mail ballot totals in putting together the Monday report. They realized the error Tuesday morning, found where they had gone wrong, and fixed it for the Tuesday evening report. If you compare the numbers in the daily report to those in the unofficial ballot by mail report, the totals will match – I checked that on Wednesday before the Day Three report came out, and both it and the early voting roster numbers synched up. That’s all there was to it.

As for turnout so far, obviously the Republicans have more. The AG race is probably the main driver, but runoffs are funny, with a shorter timeframe for voting and fewer races of interest. In 2018, Dems went from 167,982 in the primary to 57,590 in the runoff. Republicans went from 156,387 in their primary to 50,959 in their runoff. I expect both to be exceeded this time around. Beyond that, not much to say. I’ll be voting today. Have you voted yet?

2022 primary runoff Day One EV report: Lots of mail ballots

May 17th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

No news story yet as I write this, so let’s just jump right in. Here is the Day One EV report for the primary runoffs. Note that there are only five days of early voting in the runoff – as of this morning, there are now four days left – so I won’t be doing any comparisons with March, and since every runoff is its own little universe I won’t compare with previous years. You can see the final EV report for March here, though do note that several thousand more mail ballots arrived between the Friday and the following Tuesday – in total, there were about 29K total mail ballots returned as of the final results. Just over 50K mail ballots were sent out to the primary voters – we know what happened to a bunch of them, but however you want to think about it a bit less than sixty percent of all mail ballots were successfully returned.

Here are the totals so far after the first day of early voting for the runoffs:


Party    Mail   Early    Total
==============================
Dem    20,357   3,050   23,407
GOP    20,733   8,049   28,782

That’s 41K mail ballots returned, with just under 55K ballots being sent out, for a successful return rate close to 80% so far, and that will go up as more ballots come in. Maybe, just maybe, that’s a sign that the problems of March have been at least somewhat ameliorated. To be sure, these are people who almost certainly voted in March and thus have learned their own lessons from that experience. This is why I was so keen to see numbers from the May election, because that had to include a lot more first-timers. This is still an encouraging sign, even if it’s for a smaller population.

This also means that the main thing to watch for going forward is the in person voting population, as there aren’t that many mail ballots left to return and there won’t be any more sent out. I don’t feel like trawling through the past to see what the pattern for these five-day EV periods looks like, but I’d bet a dollar that Friday will be the busiest day. It’s probably not too busy now, so take advantage of the shorter lines while you can.

Early voting for the May 24 primary runoffs starts tomorrow

May 15th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

You know the drill. Primary runoffs are on, with early voting going on this week, Monday to Friday May 16 to May 20. Because it’s a runoff, you only get those five days. Voting happens from 7 AM to 7 PM each day, and you can find your EV locations here with the PDF here. As with the May special election it’s a smaller list of EV locations – it looks to me like there’s a handful more, but definitely fewer than it was for March and will be for November. Look to see if your favorite place is in use before you head out.

I’ve talked about the Chron’s lack of endorsements in the three judicial races they skipped for March till I’m blue in the face, for all the good it did me. The Chron chose instead to just re-run their original endorsements instead of considering the other races, which is not what I would have had them do. You can find all the judicial Q&As and interviews I did for the primary here, plus the ones I did for Janet Dudding, Staci Childs, and Coretta Mallet-Fontenot. The Erik Manning spreadsheet is still there, too.

We still have no idea how mail ballots went in the May election. Maybe if we’re good and we eat all our vegetables someone will report on that for this election. If you are a mail voter or know someone who is, please let us know if the experience was any different this time around versus in March. These were our chances to get it (more) right. It sure would be nice to know if that was successful. In the meantime, go vote.

Tomorrow is May Election Day

May 6th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Vote if you haven’t, then get ready to vote again in the primary runoffs.

Texas’ constitutional amendment election will take place on Saturday, May 7.

There are local propositions on the ballot, too, which vary by region. But at the statewide level, Texans will decide on two measures aiming to cut property taxes.

Proposition 1 would approve the tax cuts for elderly and disabled homeowners beginning in 2023, while a second measure seeks to raise the state’s homestead exemption from $25,000 to $40,000, lowering school property taxes by about $176 a year, on average.

Find your polling place here.

Polls will be open from 7 AM to 7 PM as usual. In Harris County you have the interactive map of polling locations and the PDF listing, which has them all in alphabetical order. I strongly suspect you will not have much of a line wherever you go.

I remain terribly disappointed with the Chronicle’s lack of coverage of these races. I can understand skimping on the HD147 special election, as the stakes there are low, but not paying any attention to the HCC special election is a travesty. As before, you can at least listen to the interviews I’ve done with the candidates and make up your own mind based on them. For HD147:

Jolanda Jones
Danielle Bess

For HCC2:

Charlene Ward Johnson
Baby Jayne McCullough
Kathy Lynch Gunter
Terrance Hall

I’m disappointed that the Chron never endorsed in that latter race or in the Constitutional amendment races. I’m comfortable saying that a Yes vote on the two propositions is fine, but go read the resources in this post, or watch this video I did with Diana Martinez Alexander and Michelle Palmer. It covers more than just the amendments on the ballot, and I’m mostly cribbing from the League of Women Voters info, but if you’d rather hear me say it than read about it, there you go. I’ll have results on Sunday, and we’ll shift gears to the primary runoffs after that. Early voting for those begins on May 16, which is to say a week from Monday, and because it’s a runoff it only lasts five days. You will definitely run into longer lines for that one.

May 2022 special election Day Nine EV report: I still have no idea what’s happening with mail ballots

May 5th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

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Yesterday was the last day for early voting in the May 7 special statewide election and other races. This Chron story rather belatedly gives an overview of the various contests on the ballot. You know what it doesn’t even mention in passing? How many mail ballots have been rejected this time around. I did a similar search for news stories as before about mail ballots this time around and found nothing. Problem solved, I guess. Insert massive shrug emoji here.

It’s true that there are some consequential and contentious school board races out there, with plenty of frothing at the mouth about “critical race theory” and banning books. I’m glad the Chron has devoted some coverage to that, though I’d argue that there should have been more and there definitely should have been at least one full article dedicated to the HCC special election. But here we are, so go educate yourself as best you can if you haven’t voted yet.

I should note, I did find this article about how the current wave of voter suppression laws has really made things harder for folks with disabilities, especially after all of the pandemic accommodations that were made and that helped them in 2020. Maybe someday SCOTUS will have a little more sympathy for the disability community than they have had for voters of color (which is an extremely low bar to clear), but that’s firmly in “I’ll believe it when I see it” territory.

Here is the final EV report for this election. At the end of early voting, there were 48,130 in person ballots, about 22K of which were cast Monday and Tuesday. It’s nice to know that even for a weird election like this, the usual pattern of early voting turnout still holds. There were 24,604 mail ballots, for a total of 72,734. I still don’t see any stories addressing, or even asking, the question of the rejection rate. Maybe that will come up again for the primary runoff. Until then, who knows.

May 2022 special election Day Seven EV report: Hey, this thing is almost over

May 2nd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

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As of today, there are just two days of early voting left for the May 2022 election, whether regular or special depending on who you are and what you may have to vote for. Election Day is on Saturday, so early voting ends on Tuesday, leaving the usual three days in between. I can just about guarantee you that if you show up to vote – you do have the two constitutional amendments on your ballot, no matter where you are – you will be in and out promptly. How do I know? This was my experience at the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center on West Gray on Saturday:

.
So weird coming to the Multi Service Center on West Gray and not seeing a single canvasser.

— kuff (@kuff) 4:09 PM – 30 April 2022

I was in and out in less than two minutes. Seriously, this will take you no time at all.

I expect these amendments to pass without any difficulty, so it’s not of vital importance what you do there. What is of greater importance for Harris County voters are the special elections, the school board and school bond elections. There’s the HD147 special election and the HCC special election, and I’ve seen diddly squat in terms of coverage for them. The Chron hasn’t even bothered to endorse in the HCC special election, which to me is a real dereliction of their duty. You can at least listen to the interviews I’ve done with the candidates and make up your own mind based on them. For HD147:

Jolanda Jones
Danielle Bess

For HCC2:

Charlene Ward Johnson
Baby Jayne McCullough
Kathy Lynch Gunter
Terrance Hall

There will be a runoff for HCC, so at least there will be a second chance to get to know who’s running. But really, why wait?

Here’s the EV daily report through Saturday, which is Day Six despite what the title of this post says. I didn’t feel like waiting until the Sunday report came in last night to finish this post, so there you have it. As of Saturday, 47,503 people had voted in Harris County, with 24,482 of those being in person and 23,021 by mail. Saturday was the tipping point for more in person votes than mail votes. I still have no idea how many mail ballots have been rejected. I will continue to keep an eye out for that. Have you voted, and if not do you intend to?

May 2022 special election Day Four EV report: Checking in on the mail ballots

Apr 29th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

In my first look at early voting for the May special election, I noted the fairly large number of mail ballots that had been cast so far in Harris County and wondered if we would hear about mail ballot rejections as we had so much during the primaries. Maybe things are better, maybe they’re not. I did a little Google News searching yesterday to see if I could find any coverage of mail ballot rejections for this election. The first story I saw was from a month ago.

It’s been nearly one week since the Lubbock County Elections Office sent out mail-in ballots for the city and school board elections in May and some have already been rejected.

Some voters are forgetting to include their ID information underneath the flap of the mail-in ballot envelope, the same issue Lubbock County saw during the March primaries.

Changes to the Texas Election Code require voters to include ID information on their mail-in ballot envelope. It’s a change Lubbock County Elections Administrator Roxzine Stinson says voters aren’t quite used to. Lubbock County had an 11 percent rejection rate in the March primaries. For the election on May 7, voters are considering two constitutional amendments, city offices, and making decisions for the future of their schools. Stinson says this election’s rejection rate is higher so far, but she thinks that will change.

“This one right now, because we haven’t had a whole lot, it’s at about 18 percent. But as ballots come back and as we get those corrected, it won’t be that high. I know as we all get familiar with the processes, and especially the voters, the numbers will go down as far as rejection rate. And we’ve always had a fairly low one, so, it’ll get there. It’s just it’s something new and we’re all learning,” she said.

Stinson says you must remember to put either your driver’s license or last four digits of your social security number under the flap of your mail-in ballot envelope. She says to fill out the section, seal the envelope, sign it and then it’s ready to mail. If your ballot is rejected, the Elections Office will notify you to make changes.

“What happens at that point, we try to contact them. Our Signature Verification Committee will reach out by phone call, we may email. If we catch it in time before it goes to them, we will mail it back to you with a new envelope so you can correct that under the flap and just send it back,” Stinson said.

The city and school election envelopes are green on one side, so they can be distinguished from other election envelopes. If you still need to request a mail-in ballot, you have to include your ID information that matches what’s on your voter registration record. Stinson says to play it safe and write down both your driver’s license and social security info. If you need help, Stinson says to give the Elections Office a call at 806-775-1338.

After all the preparation that goes into holding an election, Stinson hates rejecting a ballot.

“That hurts, I’m going to be honest, that hurts. I’ve been here 18 years and we’ve worked so hard all that time, really trying to keep clean voter rolls and I think we have one of the cleanest in the state,” Stinson said.

I’m sure other election offices are going through similar things right now. The question, for which I still don’t have a good answer, is how or if things have changed since March. Certainly, there are people working on it, but change takes time.

After tens of thousands of mail-in ballots were rejected for the March 1 primary election, advocates are raising concerns while seeing what they can do to avoid a repeat of this under the state’s new election security law that increased limits on mail-in voting.

[…]

AARP Texas Director Tina Tran said she was worried this means the votes of Texans 65-years-old and older were disproportionately tossed, since this group is traditionally the biggest percentage of voters who vote by mail.

“We do know of eligible voters who are able to vote by mail, voters 65 and older make up a huge percentage of those eligible. Those are our members. That’s our demographic. That’s who we fight for,” Tran said. “To see nearly 25,000 mail-in ballots rejected, I can glean from that it is a significant number of folks who are 65 and older. That’s why AARP is concerned. Of course, we have an interest in making sure people who want to vote are able to vote.”

Critics that included elections workers had raised alarms this could happen in the months leading up to the March 1 primary election.

[…]

Looking ahead, all eyes will be on the rejection rates for the May runoff election and November general election.

Tran said it will be on advocates and groups, like AARP Texas, to inform voters of the new measures that have thus far tripped up thousands of voters.

“Clearly, we have to step up our game. We’re not reaching certain people. There might be other trip-ups. One of the things we really need to pay attention to right now is why these ballots are getting rejected,” Tran said. “The numbers are deeply troubling. If we don’t change our strategy, if we don’t change our tactics, we could see numbers higher. Leading up to the general, if we get 12 % of mail-in ballots rejected, that’s a really significant number.”

From my perspective, it’s very much on the Texas Democratic Party, every county Democratic Party, and all of their affiliated clubs and organizations and volunteers as well. Remember, there are a whole lot of people who haven’t experienced the new law yet, and won’t until November. We have just a few months to get this right.

Election administrators are doing what they can as well.

As early voting in the May 7 election gets underway, Bexar County elections officials are taking steps to ensure they don’t have a repeat of the March 1 Primary elections in which nearly 22% of mail ballots were ultimately rejected.

This time around, every mail ballot is sent out with an informational insert reminding the voter about a new, ID number requirement that tripped up many people in the primary. That election was the first to be conducted under the requirements of the controversial state voting law, Senate Bill 1.

SB 1 requires voters to write an ID number associated with their registration on the outside of their mail ballot’s carrier envelope in a spot covered by the flap. Many either missed that requirement entirely, or wrote down the wrong number – writing in their driver’s license number, for example, when their registration was under their Social Security Number.

“It was like a tsunami,” Elections Administrator Jacquelyn Callanen said of the rejected ballots.

[…]

The Bexar County Elections Department is now including an insert in every mail ballot it sends out, Callanen said, reminding voters to include the required ID numbers – preferably both of them.

“We’re asking for both numbers because then we stand a better chance, depending on which one we have on file,” Callanen said.

The elections department website also includes detailed information on the changes to the mail ballots at the top of its main page.

Callanen is aiming for a rejection rate under 5% for the May 7 elections and says, so far, things are looking better.

That’s encouraging. I have not seen any reporting from Harris County yet, but hopefully there will be something soon. The HarrisVotes webpage has this FAQ about voting by mail that talks about the new requirements, but doesn’t explicitly say to put in both numbers. That’s a gap that needs to be addressed.

Anyway. The Day Four EV report is here. I’m not going to do any other comparisons as there’s not really anything to compare it to, but we do have 36,354 total votes cast so far, 14,951 in person and 21,403 by mail. At some point, maybe we’ll know how many tried and failed to vote by mail.

May 2022 special election Day One EV report: There were how many mail ballots?

Apr 27th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

Hey, it’s early voting time for the May 2022 special election. You know what that means, so here’s your Day One EV report for it. And here’s a comparison for Day One with the two most recent countywide elections:


Election  InPerson    Mail   Total    Sent
==========================================
Nov21        2,622  29,005  31,627  83,909
Mar22        9,815   4,053  13,868  39,366
Apr22        2,800  17,717  20,517  57,342

You can find the final EV reports for these here: November 2021 and March 2022. I’m calling this election “April 2022” above so it will be less confusing, since “Mar22 and “May22” are so similar.

I admit to being somewhat flabbergasted by the mail ballot numbers for this election. It’s a lower profile election than the one last November, but all things considered it’s off to a pretty good start. I’m keeping my eyes open for any stories about mail ballot issues, whether it’s the ballot applications, about which we had already heard plenty by this time in February, or the returned ballots. I am hopeful that at least the worst of the problems have been resolved – for sure, the county election offices should know what they’re doing, and the SOS should have its act together – but there will undoubtedly be people voting for the first time under the new law, so there will still be friction. If we’re lucky and we’ve learned from the experience, there will be less of it. That’s what I want, and that’s what the goal needs to be for November. This is the first test run, so we need to know how it goes.

On a side note, on the matter of endorsements, the following was in the Monday morning email newsletter from Progress Texas:

Vote YES on State Props 1 and 2. Prop 1 provides property tax relief to elderly homeowners and homeowners with disabilities, many of whom live on fixed incomes. Prop 2 would provide property tax relief to homeowners at a time when housing costs and property taxes have skyrocketed in our state.

Some people have asked me about the two propositions. I’d been planning to vote for Prop 2 and was ambivalent about Prop 1. I’m willing to follow this advice, but if you think otherwise please leave a comment.

How Dallas is handling supply and demand of voting centers

Apr 19th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Given the current kerfuffle over voting locations for the primary runoffs in Harris County, I thought this story from Dallas was of interest.

More than three dozen Dallas County voting sites that were used last month won’t open for elections in May and June in an attempt to cut down on problems atpolling places.

Dallas County commissioners voted Wednesday to keep 39 schools, churches and recreation centers closed to reduce the number of poll workers needed and to consolidate resources. Polling locations around the county during the March 1 primary saw long lines and technical issues that were exacerbated by poll workers who never showed up.

Kristy Noble, Dallas County Democratic Party Chair, told commissioners that officials were scrambling to find people even on Election Day to work at voting sites after 71 election judges dropped out two days earlier.

County Commissioner John Wiley Price said he heard of wait times of up to four hours to vote in DeSoto.

County Elections Administrator Michael Scarpello said some delays stemmed from poll workers not knowing how to use ADA-compliant voting machines.

The revised polling locations would be in effect for local city council and school board races on May 7, statewide Democratic and Republican primary runoff elections in May 24, and for potential runoffs for the local races in June.

Scarpello said sites on the chopping block included those with low voter turnout or places within half a mile of other polling places. Republican and Democratic officials as well as city secretaries and Independent School District officials around the county were among those consulted beforehand, he said.

According to the county, there were around 460 voting centers open on Election Day in March. There were 67 locations that saw less than 100 voters cast ballots.

Scarpello said a plan is in the works to boost financial incentives for county workers to work at polling locations.

Commissioner Elba Garcia also mentioned a possible partnership with Dallas College to allow students to get paid and earn school credit to work at voting sites.

But concerns remain about how the county would properly communicate the changes to the public.

Voters have been allowed to cast ballots at any polling place in the county since 2019, but many still believe they’re still restricted to voting at their neighborhood precinct location, Scarpello said.

“We need to do a better job of saying, ‘you can vote anywhere, anytime’ and here’s how you find out about which locations,” he said.

See here for the Harris County issue. There are a lot of factors at play here, but one that stands out to me is that we’ve only been doing voting centers on Election Day for a few years now – some places have done it longer than others – and it seems there may be a lack of data about where people are actually voting, and where they might choose to vote if they fully understood their options. We’ve had early voting with vote-anywhere locations for 20+ years now, and I think people understand that, but they may not have internalized the idea that voting centers on Election Day means they can do the same. There may also be some behavioral differences for when Election Day is on a Tuesday, a day when most people work and may find it more convenient to vote near their place of employment, versus Saturday when most people don’t work and may prefer to vote closer to home. What I’m saying is, the larger counties ought to spend some time studying this, to see how they can do better, to provide a sufficient number of voting locations in places that make the most sense.

Getting enough election workers is mostly a matter of money, but a little creativity in the search for workers couldn’t hurt. College students, even high school seniors, should be tapped as a potential resource, with the understanding that they too would need to be adequately compensated. More robust protection against threats from violent (let’s be honest, right-wing) fringes would help across the board. There are a lot of things the counties can do to improve this experience, even after all of the vote-suppressive legislation we’ve had to endure. It has to be a priority for it to happen.

Judge rules against Prairie View students in 2018 voting rights case

Mar 29th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

There was a lot of legal activity last week, so it took me a minute to get to this story.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that Waller County did not discriminate against student voters at Prairie View A&M University during the 2018 general election when it granted them fewer days and hours for early voting, the latest chapter in a history of voting rights struggles in the southeast Texas county.

In a 128-page ruling and summary of the case, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Eskridge said there wasn’t evidence to “establish a concern” over the lack of any early voting location on campus or in the city of Prairie View during the first week of early voting that year. The county commissioners court, Eskridge found, allocated early voting locations and hours on an “objective and reasonable basis” that did not run afoul of the federal Voting Rights Act or the U.S. Constitution.

The case dates to 2018, when a group of Prairie View A&M students sued the county, alleging it set up an unlawful lopsided schedule that offered students — most of them Black — fewer opportunities to vote early than the county’s white residents. But the fight over student voting rights on the historically Black campus, built on a former plantation, stretches across decades and generations of students.

[…]

The legal fight emerged in the fall of 2018 when students realized the county’s early voting schedule left Prairie View residents with far fewer days and hours for voting than other population centers in the county, and zero opportunity to vote in the city during the first half of the early voting period.

Prairie View, where the vast majority of residents are Black, had five days of early voting. In two of the three other towns that serve as population hubs in Waller County, with many more white residents than Prairie View, early voting would run during all 12 days of the early voting period. In the third town, early voting would be available for 11 days.

The students pressed for better access at a commissioners court meeting five days before the start of early voting in 2018, at which Waller County Judge Trey Duhon noted there was “an inequity” in the number of overall hours among commissioners’ precincts. But the court ultimately voted to make no changes.

Students sued days later, asking a federal judge to order the county to set up an early voting site on campus that would offer weekend hours. This prompted an emergency meeting in which the commissioners court instead voted to extend hours on the three days an on-campus location was previously scheduled to host voting during the second week of early voting. And in a city without public transportation and where many students don’t have cars, the court added five hours of weekend voting at Prairie View City Hall — a two-and-a-half-mile walk one way from some student housing.

At a roughly two-week trial in 2020, Duhon cast the commissioners court’s 2018 decisions as a balancing act to provide early voting access to everyone in the county “to the best of our ability.” He reasoned that because the on-campus voting location was in a student center frequented by students — some passing through multiple times a day — hosting early voting there for two or three days “affords them multiple opportunities” to cast their ballots.

But the county also argued students were seeking preferential access over the community, including residents who have to travel longer distances to vote.

[…]

In listing the various reasons for why he sided with the county, Eskridge noted that Prairie View had more voting hours than smaller population centers and that the two precincts in Waller County with the most allocated hours were majority-Black districts.

He also wrote that the initial early voting plan was adopted following normal procedures, including a joint agreement by the local party chairs. The county previously explained that the local chair of the Democratic Party had asked to push early voting at Prairie View to the second week of the early voting period, noting concerns that voting would conflict with homecoming events.

And students were offered a “convenience of hours” at an on-campus location they frequented that others in the county did not have, he wrote.

“At best, Plaintiffs establish a mere inconvenience imposed on PVAMU students with respect to the early voting schedule for the 2018 general election,” Eskridge said. “In reality, it’s rather doubtful that the early voting locations and hours provided by Waller County to PVAMU students can be understood as creating any incremental inconvenience at all.”

See here and here for some background. A copy of the opinion, which I have not read, is here. It seems like Waller County did try to make some accommodations, which the judge accepted as sufficient, though why the PVA&M locations couldn’t have been there for the duration of early voting remains a question to me. I’m sure Waller County would say they were just doing the best they could with the resources they had, and since the judge bought it, there had to be some merit to that. I would say this is an argument for the state to put up more money for counties to provide more voting locations, as well as an argument for making it easier to vote by mail and allowing more people to vote by mail, instead of the ridiculous system we have now. That would be a very cost-effective way to accommodate people who would otherwise have a difficult time getting to a voting location. For obvious reasons, we’re not getting any of that with the state government we have now.

A trifecta of crap from the Fifth Circuit

Mar 18th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

It’s what they do.

A federal appeals court has ruled for Texas in three lawsuits challenging the state’s voting laws, including mail-in ballot provisions and the elimination of straight-ticket voting.

In a series of 2-1 rulings Wednesday evening, a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the lawsuits by civil rights groups, political organizations and voters targeted the wrong state agency — the Texas secretary of state’s office — when they sought to overturn a string of voting laws and practices.

Because the secretary of state is not in charge of enforcing the challenged laws, the agency is protected by sovereign immunity in all three lawsuits, said the opinions written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan and joined by Judge Don Willett.

Judge Patrick Higginbotham dissented in all three cases, writing that he believed the majority was splitting hairs by narrowly interpreting which state officers enforce election laws.

The secretary of state is the chief election officer of Texas who is charged by law with protecting the voting rights of Texans “from abuse by the authorities administering the state’s electoral processes,” Higginbotham wrote.

“The allegation in these cases is that the Secretary is failing in that duty. This charge should satisfy our … inquiry,” he said.

Reporter Chuck Lindell first posted about this on Twitter, so if for some reason the Statesman link doesn’t work or gets paywalled, you can see the basics there. Let’s break down the three cases:

A challenge by the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans and two national Democratic organizations sought to overturn a 2017 law that ended straight-ticket voting, also known as one-punch voting because it lets voters select all candidates of a particular political party in one step.

A state district judge barred enforcement of the law, ruling in September 2020 that the change unconstitutionally burdened the right to vote.

See here and here for the background. This one confused me at first, because there had been a basically identical challenge filed earlier in the same court by a different set of plaintiffs that was later dismissed by that judge. I don’t know why the subsequent challenge, which fell under the Democracy Docket umbrella, was more successful, but there you have it. You may recall I was skeptical of this one, and of the three it’s the one I’m the least upset about. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling is here.

A lawsuit by the NAACP and Texas Alliance for Retired Americans sought to block mail-in ballot regulations that require voters to pay for postage and mandate that ballots be postmarked by 7 p.m. on Election Day and received by 5 p.m. on the next day.

The lawsuit also challenged signature-matching requirements and a law that makes it a crime to possess another voter’s mail ballot.

See here and here for the background. I thought this was an interesting suit that made a reasoned case and that in a fair world would have gotten a more thoughtful review by the Fifth Circuit, but that ain’t the world we live in. I don’t know if this subject was addressed in one of the many voting rights bills that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema personally strangled (with the help of all 50 Republicans, of course), but if there’s ever another opportunity to address voting rights at a federal level, this should be an item on the to do list. The Fifth Circuit opinion is here.

A lawsuit by groups including the League of Women Voters of Texas and the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities challenged the process of verifying mail-in ballots by ensuring that the voter’s signature on the outside envelope matches the signature on the vote-by-mail application.

A trial judge granted a detailed injunction limiting the practice in September 2020, but again the 5th Circuit Court stepped in to halt the injunction until the appeal was decided. Wednesday’s ruling vacated the injunction.

See here, here, and here for the background. Remember when signature matching was our biggest concern about mail ballots? Boy, those were the days. Anyway, even though this suit was filed in 2019, that injunction was halted by a different Fifth Circuit panel because it was too close to the election. There’s always, always an excuse. The opinion for this one is here.

The first and third cases were reversed and remanded to the district court “for further proceedings consistent with this opinion”, while the second was reversed and remanded with instructions to dismiss. I’m not quite sure what further proceedings there may be, and it may be that the bigger problems caused by SB1 may make the third case not particularly relevant at this time, I dunno. I assume that since the issue cited by the Fifth Circuit was that the SOS was not the proper defendant, the cases could be refiled with some number of county election administrators as defendants instead. I don’t know how practical that would be, and I also don’t know if this is just a prelude to the Fifth Circuit (or later SCOTUS) ruling that actually you can’t sue those people either, because the whole idea that you can pursue redress in a federal court is just an illusion anyway or whatever. We’ll see if anything does get refiled, but I would not feel particularly optimistic about any of it.

UPDATE: And when I checked Twitter on Thursday, I saw that Prof. Vladeck had addressed my questions.

.
In a trio of major rulings, the same Fifth Circuit panel held, 2-1, that plaintiffs can’t sue the Texas Secretary of State to challenge certain voting restrictions; instead, they have to sue each *county* election chief — in a state that has 254 counties:

https://ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/20/20-40643-CV1.pdf

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) 5:59 PM – 17 March 2022

.
It’s one thing, as with #SB8, for the state to absolve itself of *any* enforcement responsibility as a transparent ploy to defeat judicial review. This is even worse — foreclosing Ex parte Young against the “chief election officer” of the state for challenges to … election laws.

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) 6:03 PM – 17 March 2022

Always expect the worst from the Fifth Circuit. You’ll almost never be wrong.

Precinct analysis: Final 2022 primary vote totals from those counties of interest

Mar 10th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

1 comment

At the end of early voting, I posted some totals from various counties around the state. I noted at the time it was an imprecise comparison since I included final 2018 turnout numbers as the comparison point for 2022 and said I’d update that table when voting was over. Well, voting is over, so let’s return to that table and see what we can see.


County       2018 Dem   2018 GOP  2022 Dem  2022 GOP
====================================================
Bell            7,282     18,149     9,089    20,912
Bexar          81,408     67,977    94,334    87,277
Brazoria       10,085     24,376    11,331    30,541
Brazos          5,131     12,365     4,611    16,430
Cameron        14,123      4,003    19,705    10,504
Collin         34,669     66,078    36,368    79,431
Comal           4,150     17,662     4,847    23,874
Dallas        123,671     80,583   126,203    86,551
Denton         27,025     49,474    27,340    68,104
El Paso        54,184     12,096    37,017    18,240
Ellis           4,243     15,906     5,376    18,536
Fort Bend      29,322     34,707    39,613    45,582
Hays           11,397     11,881    12,972    15,475
Hidalgo        37,739      7,050    37,309    15,042
Johnson         2,618     12,280     2,485    17,085
Lubbock         5,900     21,964     5,599    27,552
Maverick        6,300        111     6,653       623
Montgomery      9,701     48,921    10,585    71,451
Nueces         12,345     12,553    13,426    18,871
Smith           4,704     22,826     6,362    27,668
Starr           6,729         15     3,410     1,089
Tarrant        71,876    105,317    73,410   129,628
Travis        113,070     39,177   108,831    46,416
Webb           21,137      1,426    17,675     2,963
Williamson     25,681     35,675    26,067    47,431

The first thing you might notice is that the final numbers for Starr and Maverick counties are less than the final EV totals I had. How can that be? I double-checked the final EV totals on the SOS webpage, and they are now as they were then, 6,895 for Maverick and 5,188 for Starr. I may not know much, but I know that election totals go up, not down. How do I explain this?

I went and looked at the Starr County Elections page to see what I could find. What I found is that the turnout numbers they presented for the Democratic and Republican primaries are indeed different than what the SOS reported for the gubernatorial races, by a fair amount. While there were 3,410 votes cast in the Governor’s race on the Democratic side in Starr, and 1,089 on the Republican side, total turnout for Democrats was given as 6,456, with 1,444 as the total for Republicans. You can see if you scroll through that some races, like the CD28 Dem primary, got a lot more votes than the gubernatorial primary. I figured maybe the action was a bit heavier downballot, and that seemed to be true on the Dem side in that there were a lot more votes cast in the eight Justice of the Peace races. There were still undervotes, which were easier to comprehend as they were a lot closer to the “total votes” figures for each race, but if you added up all the votes in those eight JP precincts, you get the 6,456 and 1,444 figures cited.

Make of that what you will. The transition from the “actual total turnout regardless of who voted in what race” to the “total that actually voted in this race” was jarring, in this case because the undervote rate was so low. I have no idea what it might have been in 2018, so I can’t draw any conclusions. As for Maverick County, I couldn’t find a report from their website, just what the SOS had. Insert shrug emoji here.

Anyway. I didn’t have an agenda for this post, just an intention to keep the promise made before. I’ve got some other posts about primary voting in the works and will run those in the coming days.

Initial post-election wrapup

Mar 3rd, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

11 comments

Just a few updates and observations to add onto what I posted yesterday morning. Any deeper thoughts, if I have them, will come later.

– Cheri Thomas and William Demond won their races for the 14th Court of Appeals. I didn’t mention them yesterday, just too much to cover.

– Also didn’t mention any of the SBOE races, four of which are headed to runoffs on the Dems side, including SBOE4 in Harris County. Those were all open or (with SBOE11) Republican-held seats. The three incumbents were all winners in their races – Marisa Perez-Diaz (SBOE3) and Aicha Davis (SBOE13) were unopposed, while Rebecca Bell-Metereau (SBOE5) easily dispatched two challengers.

– All of the district court judges who were leading as of yesterday morning are still leading today.

– Harold Dutton also held on in HD142, but the final result was much closer once the Tuesday votes were counted. He ultimately prevailed with less than 51% of the vote.

– Cam Campbell took and held onto the lead in HD132 (he had trailed by four votes initially), defeating Chase West 52.8 to 47.2, about 300 votes.

– Titus Benton was still leading in SD17, though his lead shrunk from 484 in early voting to 275.

– I touched on this in the runoff roundup post, but the perception that Jessica Cisneros was leading Rep. Henry Cuellar was totally a function of the order in which the counties reported their results. I say this because if you click on the race details for the CD28 primary on the SOS election returns page, you see that Cuellar led by more than 1,500 votes in early voting; he stretched that to about a 2,400 vote lead in the end, though it was just barely not enough to get to 50%. But because Bexar County was first out of the gate and thus first to be picked up by the SOS, and Cisneros ran strongly there, it looked like she was about to blow him out. There are a couple of tweets from Tuesday night that did not age well because of that.

– Statewide, the Dem gubernatorial primary will be a bit short of 1.1 million votes, up a tiny bit from 2018, while the GOP primary for Governor is over 1.9 million votes, comfortably ahead of the 1.55 million from 2018. More Republicans overall turned out on Tuesday than Dems statewide. In Harris County, it looks like the turnout numbers were at 157K for Dems and 180K for Republicans, with about 43% of the vote in each case being cast on Tuesday. Dems were down about 10K votes from 2018, Rs up about 24K. In a year where Republicans are supposed to have the wind at their backs and certainly had a lot more money in the primaries, I’m not sure that’s so impressive. That said, March is not November. Don’t go drawing broad inferences from any of this.

– At the risk of violating my own warning, I will note that the CD15 primary, in a district that is now slightly lean R and with the overall GOP turnout advantage and clear evidence of more GOP primary participation in South Texas, the Dem candidates combined for 32,517 votes while the Republicans and their million-dollar candidate combined for 29,715 votes. Does that mean anything? Voting in one party’s primary, because that’s where one or more local races of interest to you are, doesn’t mean anything for November, as any number of Democratic lawyers with Republican voting histories from a decade or more ago can attest. Still, I feel like if there had been more votes cast in that Republican primary that someone would make a big deal out of it, so since that didn’t happen I am noting it for the record. Like I said, it may mean absolutely nothing, and November is still a long way away, but it is what happened so there you have it.

– In Fort Bend, County Judge KP George won his own primary with about the same 70% of the vote as Judge Hidalgo did here. Longtime County Commissioner Grady Prestage defeated two challengers but just barely cleared fifty percent to avoid a runoff. The other commissioner, first termer Ken DeMerchant, didn’t do nearly as well. He got just 14.3% of the vote, and will watch as Dexter McCoy and Neeta Sane will battle in May. I confess, I wasn’t paying close attention to this race and I don’t have an ear to the ground in Fort Bend, so I don’t know what was the cause of this shocking (to me, anyway) result. Sitting County Commissioners, even first timers, just don’t fare that poorly in elections. Community Impact suggests redistricting might not have done him any favors, but still. If you have some insight, please leave a comment.

– As was the case in Harris, a couple of incumbent judges in Fort Bend lost in their primaries. I don’t know any of the players there, and my overall opinion of our system of choosing judges hasn’t changed from the last tiresome time we had this conversation.

This came in later in the day, so I thought I’d add it at the end instead of shoehorning it into the beginning.

Harris County election officials are still counting ballots Wednesday morning for the Tuesday Primary Election. Despite the Texas Secretary of State John B. Scott saying officials will not finish counting ballots by the deadline, Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria said she’s confident counting votes will be done.

“It’s going to take a couple of days to finish the entire process as we’ve always seen,” Longoria said. “I don’t have concerns about counting the election ballots for this election.”

[…]

Harris County Voting Director Beth Stevens said the paper ballot system slows down the process for both voters and election workers.

“We’re working with paper here, what we know is we have hundreds of thousands of ballots processed accurately and securely here in our central counting station and we’re working with 2.5 million registered voters,” Stevens said.

In addition to voter registration identification mishaps, and mail-in ballot rejections, Harris County election officials also said damaged ballots have become an issue in the counting process. According to Stevens, damaged ballots have to be duplicated before being scanned by electronic tabulators and counted in at the central polling location. Officials said this could take some time.

“There was a negative attempt to make Harris County look bad in this moment and it’s completely unnecessary because we are processing as appropriate,” Stevens said. “Voters can be sure that paper ballots and electronic media that go with that is the most safe and secure ballot in the country.”

And this.

More than 1,600 ballots in Harris County were not read properly by the county’s new voting machines because of human error, the elections administration office said, resulting in a slower tabulation process for Tuesday’s primaries.

The new system requires voters to take paper ballots with their selections from a voting machine and feed it into a counting machine. Voters did this incorrectly in some cases, said elections office spokeswoman Leah Shah, making the ballots unreadable. Instead, those ballots were re-scanned at the county’s election headquarters, an extra time-consuming step.

Shah said Harris County’s long primary ballot required voters to feed two sheets of paper instead of the usual one, increasing the chance of error if they are inserted the wrong way or inadvertently creased or wrinkled. The 1,629 incorrectly scanned ballots represent less than 1 percent of the nearly 500,000 primary ballots cast.

“These are margins of error that are already accounted for, built in to how we process the ballot,” Shah said. “But we also understand the importance of having the paper trail and having that extra layer of security and backup.”

Voter Sara Cress, who ran the county’s popular elections social media accounts in 2020, said the first page of her ballot became wrinkled in her hand as she filled out the second page. When she attempted to feed the scuffed sheet into the counting machine, it would not take.

“I tried it twice, and then two poll workers tried it over and over again, and it just was giving errors,” Cress said.

[…]

Shah said new requirements under SB1, the voting bill passed by the Legislature last year, placed additional strain on county elections staff. She said 30 percent of the 24,000 mail ballots received have been flagged for rejection because they fail to meet the law’s ID requirements.

Elections staff have been calling those voters, who mostly are over 65, to inform them of the March 7 deadline by which they must provide the correct information or their ballots will not be counted.

The issue with the printers is one reason why the new voting machines were rolled out last year, when they could be tested in a lower-turnout environment. Fewer initial disruptions, but perhaps not enough actual testing to work through all the problems. Going to need a lot more voter education, and more stress testing on those machines. The fiasco with the mail ballots, which is 100% on the Republicans, is putting a lot of pressure on the elections staff. None of this had to happen like this. I mean, if we’re going to talk voter education, not to mention training for county election workers, that was a complete failure on the state’s part. It’s easy to dump on the Secretary of State here, and they do deserve some blame, but they too were put in a no-win spot by the Republicans.

As far as the rest goes, the early voting totals were up at about 7:20 or so on Tuesday night. Initial results came in slowly, as you could tell from my posts yesterday, but almost all of the voting centers had reported by 1 PM yesterday. I do believe there will be some improvement with the printers before November. At least we have two more chances to work out the kinks before then, with the primary runoffs, the May special election, and possibly May special election runoffs. Here’s hoping.

Some thoughts on Primary Day

Mar 1st, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

Will we learn more about the mail ballot debacle?

Mail ballot usage during early voting has dropped precipitously since 2018, with tens of thousands of voters — especially Republicans — ditching the forms after two years of the GOP’s baseless claims that absentee voting facilitates fraud.

By the end of early voting on Friday, roughly 77,000 mail ballots had been processed in Texas’ 15 most populous counties, representing .7 percent of registered voters there. Four years ago, the total was 126,000 — about 1.3 percent of voters in those counties. (The Secretary of State does not provide statewide early voting totals for the 2018 election.)

The dropoff is most dramatic among Republicans, whose party has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that state-approved expansions of mail ballots during the pandemic led to widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

During the last midterm primary election in 2018, more than 67,000 Republicans in the state’s most populous counties filled out a mail ballot by the close of early voting. This year, the total hasn’t cracked 27,000.

The number dropped slightly for Democrats, too. More than 50,000 Democratic voters in those counties have cast an absentee ballot this year, compared to 59,000 in 2018.

[…]

By the time the application deadline passed on Feb. 18, Dallas County had rejected about 15.7 percent of all forms, the majority of them for a missing or incorrect ID. In Travis County, the rejection rate was 9 percent.

Now, county officials are dealing with the same problem for the actual ballots, which must be submitted by Tuesday. As of Friday, 30 percent of mail ballots were rejected over the new ID law in Harris County. In Dallas, it was 27 percent.

We’ve discussed this before. We need to know more about what happened with mail ballots. Remember, there were two parts to this, one for the application for the mail ballot, and one for the ballot itself. How many applications, from each party, were initially rejected for not using the right form or not being filled out correctly, with the right voter ID information? How many of those were subsequently fixed, and how many were never resolved? Of the mail ballots that were then sent out and returned, how many from each party were initially rejected for (again) not having the right voter ID information included? How many of those were then fixed and successfully submitted? Of the people who didn’t get their mail ballots fixed and returned, how many then voted in person? How many people who voted by mail in the 2020 and/or 2018 primaries and who are still on the voter rolls did not vote at all this year? More data, please!

What do you think the Expectations Line is for the gubernatorial primaries?

What will likely be the biggest heavyweight battle for governor of Texas in nearly 30 years is just days away from getting underway in Texas.

While Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrat Beto O’Rourke have been sizing each other up and jabbing at one another in nearly every corner of the state, both have unfinished business on Tuesday. But first they need to finish off a collection of underfunded primary challengers.

What little public polling there has been suggests neither Abbott nor O’Rourke has much to worry about on Tuesday, but that hasn’t stopped an urgency from slipping into the stump speeches as they plead with supporters to go vote.

“We’ve got to get everyone turned out,” O’Rourke told a crowd of supporters in McAllen in the Rio Grande Valley last weekend despite a recent University of Texas poll showing him winning the primary with 90 percent of the vote. “We’ve got to make sure we reach out to everybody.”

The same poll had Abbott avoiding a runoff by holding on to 60 percent of the vote in his primary. Yet in El Paso earlier this week at a get-out-the-vote rally, Abbott warned his supporters that “freedom itself is on the ballot.”

The article is mostly about the forthcoming general election battle between the two, but I’m curious what number the pundits will have in mind for their percentage of the vote in the primaries. Remember, when Beto got 61.8% in the three-way 2018 primary, it was seen as underperforming, even to the point of speculation from some corners that the overall Beto experience was overhyped. I think we know how that turned out. I also think we all expect Beto to do a lot better than 61.8% this time around, even though he has a bigger field and one opponent who managed to draw some attention, even though she’s basically been invisible since then. Beto is much better known this time and he’s been at least as active as he was in 2018, so maybe 75% for him? There are always some people who do their own thing. The only number that really matters is 50%+1, and after that it’s all in the interpretation. I’m not going to worry about it.

As for Abbott, I fully expect him to win without a runoff. (I still think Ken Paxton will, too, but I won’t be surprised to be wrong about that.) Abbott got 90% against two no-names in 2018 (I will give you $1 right now if you can tell me who they were without looking it up), but he ain’t getting that much this time around. Being forced into a runoff will be seen (correctly) as a disaster for Abbott, but if he clears the fifty percent line, I think he’ll be seen as the winner regardless of by how much. Remember, Rick Perry in 2010 got only 51% of the vote in his primary, but because he led KBH by 20 points (because no one took Debra Medina seriously) it was seen as a resounding victory for him. I think Abbott wins in round one, Huffines and West split the super-crazy vote so that he has a sizeable margin against each of them, and nobody talks much about the primary afterwards. Anyone disagree with that?

Of course, your vote in the Republican primary for Governor is really a vote for your favorite jackboot billionaire. Also mostly true in the Republican legislative primaries. Maybe we should talk a little more about that?

Here’s the Derek Ryan email for the end of early voting:

Good afternoon! Early voting wrapped up on Friday and the final totalsare that just over one million people voted early (or by mail) in the 2022 Republican Primary and 620,000 people voted early (or by mail) in the 2022 Democratic Primary. That means roughly 6% turnout on the Republican side and 3.6% turnout on the Democratic side.

In the 2020 Republican Primary, 54.5% of votes were cast by mail or during early voting. If those percentages hold up this year, that would equate to around 1.85 million votes being cast in the Republican Primary. (In the 2018 Republican Primary, there were 1.5 million votes cast.)

In the 2020 Democratic Primary, 49% of votes were cast by mail or during early voting. If those percentages hold up this year, that would equate to around 1.3 million votes being cast in the Democratic Primary. (In the 2018 Democratic Primary, there were one million votes cast.)

The average age of voters in the Republican Primary is 62.6 years old while the average age of voters in the Democratic Primary is 58.5 years old.

14.1% of votes cast in the Republican Primary are voters who did not vote in any party’s primary between 2014 and 2020. On the Democratic side, that percentage is 13.8%. These are individuals who have been general election-only voters, but it also includes voters who have moved to the state, just become eligible to vote, and individuals who have been registered to vote but haven’t participated in an election over the last eight years.

Only half of voters who voted in all four of their party’s last four primary elections ended up voting early. Over 85% of these individuals typically end up voting in a midterm primary election and there are 248,000 of these on the Republican side and 107,000 on the Democratic side who have not voted early.

I’ve based most of my comparisons on 2018, as it’s a non-Presidential year, but there’s no reason not to take 2020 into account. Ryan will have two more reports after Election Day.

Finally, a bit of final turnout data from Hector DeLeon:

.
Do past #Midterm #Primary statistics predict #ElectionDay #vote totals for #HarrisCounty #Texas?
#Elections2022 #Politics #go_vote @ReneeCrossTX @TSUMPA @UHPoliticalSci @jcortina @MarkPJonesTX @bjrottinghaus @PabloMPinto @MarcCommentary @kuff @PoliticsLatino @RiceKinderInst

— hectordeleon (@hdl_perspective) 1:55 PM – 28 February 2022

I’ve made my guesses, now we’ll see what the reality is. The 19th has more.

2022 primary early voting statewide

Feb 28th, 2022

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Turnout information for early voting for all counties is available on the Secretary of State website. They used to only have this for the 30 most populous counties, which skewed things in a Democratic direction, but a law passed in 2019 required the data to be made available for all counties. Now that early voting has been completed, let’s see what the totals looked like in other counties of interest around the state.

Unfortunately, we can’t make a direct comparison for some of the counties I was interested in because as noted the SOS only has EV data for thirty counties. So what I did instead was collect the final turnout information for the 2018 Senate primaries in both parties. What that means is that the data below is a bit skewed, since we’re comparing EV turnout to overall turnout. Even there, “overall turnout” is a bit misleading since there are always undervotes, and the data I’ve captured for 2018 doesn’t include that. The 2022 numbers includes everyone who showed up, the 2018 data only has the ones who voted in their Senate races. It’s the best I can do. Here’s what it looks like:


County       2018 Dem   2018 GOP  2022 Dem  2022 GOP
====================================================
Bell            7,282     18,149     4,550     9,574
Bexar          81,408     67,977    60,033    50,025
Brazoria       10,085     24,376     6,809    20,323
Brazos          5,131     12,365     2,241     7,902
Collin         34,669     66,078    20,784    43,779
Comal           4,150     17,662     3,040    13,530
Dallas        123,671     80,583    66,109    38,928
Denton         27,025     49,474    14,683    37,288
El Paso        54,184     12,096    20,320     9,199
Ellis           4,243     15,906     2,479     8,136
Fort Bend      29,322     34,707    25,646    28,275
Hays           11,397     11,881     7,316     8,210
Johnson         2,618     12,280     1,224     8,175
Lubbock         5,900     21,964     3,267    17,184
Montgomery      9,701     48,921     6,052    41,596
Nueces         12,345     12,553     6,682     9,962
Smith           4,704     22,826     3,933    15,481
Tarrant        71,876    105,317    38,674    70,021
Travis        113,070     39,177    58,329    23,357
Williamson     25,681     35,675    14,558    26,672

For the most part, nothing terribly exciting. Overall Democratic turnout is about 627K, about 62% of the 2018 Senate race total of 1.04 million. Republicans are at about 1.02 million, or about 66% of the way to the 1.55 million they had in their Senate primary. While I talked about the “premier races” driving turnout statewide in the last entry, conditions in an individual county can vary. High profile and/or expensive races for Congress, County Judge, or other local offices can have an effect. Different counties have different patterns for how much of the vote is cast early versus on Election Day. We also have to consider the effect of SB1 on mail ballots. So far this year there have been 49,888 Republican primary ballots cast by mail, compared to 71,329 for the Dems. We don’t know the total figures for 2018, but a look at the top 30 county numbers makes it clear that Republicans used mail ballots a lot more four years ago.

So overall I don’t see too much that stands out. The one place that is a bit remarkable is El Paso, where Democratic voting is down quite a bit from 2018. We know that Beto was a big draw overall in El Paso, more so in the general, but remember that in 2018 there was also the primary to succeed Beto in Congress, and it was a fairly expensive race that featured then-County Judge and now Rep. Veronica Escobar. I suspect that drove some people to the polls as well.

What about the South Texas/Rio Grande Valley counties that shifted red in 2020? Here’s the same sample I looked at before, updated for the 2022 numbers:


County       2018 Dem   2018 GOP  2022 Dem  2022 GOP
====================================================
Cameron        14,123      4,003    14,500     6,455
Hidalgo        37,739      7,050    31,924    10,398
Maverick        6,300        111     6,895       440
Starr           6,729         15     5,188       969
Webb           21,137      1,426    13,384     1,499

Definitely more participation on the Republican side, exceeding the final 2018 totals in all five counties, though overall those numbers are still quite low compared to the Dems. Democratic numbers in Cameron and Maverick have also topped their 2018 counterparts, and are not far behind in Hidalgo and Starr. I’m a little puzzled by Webb, since that’s the center of the CD28 primary battle, but maybe that’s a mostly-vote-on-Election-Day place. We’ll see tomorrow. Have you voted yet?

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