Voter numbers in Denton County just keep climbing.
Early voting totals cracked 6,000 for the first time Monday as the second week of early voting rolls on.
“What we’re seeing is they are running 20 percent higher than they did in the last gubernatorial election,” said Dianne Edmondson, chairwoman of the Denton County Republican Party. “Part of that is the increase in population growth.
It’s partly driven by a very strong governor’s race and the tight race on the fracking ban and quite frankly a lot of students interested in having liquor to drink.”
A polling site on the University of North Texas campus began taking voters Monday and 400 ballots have been cast there, according to Lannie Noble, Denton County elections administrator.
The day ended with a total of 40,450 residents casting their votes, 6,236 more than through the same day during the early voting period in the 2010 gubernatorial election, which is an increase of 18.2 percent.
Phyllis Wolper, Denton County Democratic Party chairwoman, said she is probably the least surprised person in the county about the increased numbers.
“Only because it was an absolute goal of the Democratic Party to turn out greater numbers than we have ever turned out before,” she said.
Wolper noted that organizations such as Battleground Texas are involved and registering thousands of voters and this gives her hope that many of these thousands voting early are Democratic voters.
But even though statistics are showing an increase in early voting, Noble said it does not mean there will be the same increase on Election Day.
“You don’t know what the patterns will be until the day after,” he said.
The uncertainty of things cannot be allowed to affect preparation for the voters, Noble said.
“You have to make educated guesses,” he said. “We looked at this, and we allocated equipment on what we thought we needed for early voting.”
For Election Day, Noble said there’s a suggested formula for ballots and equipment and how much to carry, and election officials take that and adjust it to what they see in Denton County.
“We kicked the number of paper ballots up a little bit,” he said. “We wanted to make sure if we did have an increase, that everyone had an opportunity either electronically, or if the electronics were too busy, we will have plenty of paper out there for people to vote.”
Everything was running smoothly Tuesday, Noble said. There were still some long lines at the UNT polling site at Sycamore Hall, but Noble said that meant people were interested in voting and he’d never say that was a bad thing.
“Every now and again someone’s Internet connection goes down,” he said.
“Any time you are dependent on the Internet, things like that happen. Outside of running supplies to locations, we haven’t had any issues we need to go out and take care of.”
Tara Linn Hunter, a polling site volunteer who was at Sycamore Hall on Monday and Tuesday, said everyone who was out there stumping for their side was civil and getting along despite any reports to the contrary.
“Both sides have hand-outs of sorts,” she said. “But the main point of our side has been to make sure people know they can vote and clear up confusion of ballot wording.”
BJ LEWIS can be reached at 940-566-6875 and via Twitter @BjLewisDRC.
