Early Voting Off to an Amazing Start

Signs outside East Austin's Victory Grill implore citizens to vote early (photo by Lee Nichols)

The first day of early voting has ended, and the results are impressive here in Travis County. A total of 24,207 went to the many Early and Mobile Voting sites around the county today; combined with the 8,400 mail-in ballots received, that adds up to 32,607 votes cast already – 5.35% of Travis County's registered voters.

Compare that with 2004, when it took the first two days of early voting to reach 6%. (And consider: Total registered voters that year in Travis was 553,565; now, it's up to 609,224.) That year's first day totals were 16,139 early voters and 715 mail ballots, totaling 16,854.

Extend this out over the full 12 days of early voting, and the early turnout projects to be 290,484, well above the 222,085 of 2004. [EDIT: This is wrong; see below.] Of course, history shows us that turnout will not remain steady, but will actually spike sharply upward in the last few days, so we could be looking at some really fantastic numbers by the end.

UPDATE: Holy crap, the lightbulb finally went off in my math-impaired brain: Registration is up only 10%, but voting (at least for the first day) is up 93%. Wow.

UPDATE 2: Further proof that I'm math-impaired – I used the wrong number in my projection above and forgot to include the mail-in ballots. So actually, it projects to 391,284, well above the 60% of registered voters that the county clerk is hoping to get in early voting.