Kevin Roden for Denton City Council

Early Voting Analysis

November 3rd, 2014Uncategorized1 comment

There’s so much to be interested in when the polls close on Tuesday, especially if you live in Denton. With 2 citizen-initiated ballot initiatives (one on fracking and one on alcohol) and a series of city bond initiatives, there’s a lot to pay attention to for what is typically a run-of-the-mill midterm election in Texas.

There’s a bunch of talk about historic voter turnout in this election and already people are pointing to local issues, particularly the initiative to ban fracking, as a reason for this. It is too early to tell the ultimate turnout and clearly too early and simple to point to a particular issue on the ballot. Keep in mind, there is also a Governor’s race at the top of the ticket and this is the first open-seat Governor’s race in Texas since Ann Richards battled Clayton Williams for the open seat in 1990. Bush v Richards in 1994 was arguably another energizing race (even though an incumbent was on the ticket). All this to say, judging turnout of this election vis-a-vis previous Governor’s races/midterm elections is not precisely the right way to analyze this. We know that Battleground Texas has been working the state for a significant amount of time to register voters and drive turnout. That, in turn, has resulted in an equally competitive ground game on the part of the Republicans. We may very well see an historic turnout, but it is likely to be the result of efforts at the top of the ticket, not necessarily city-specific issues.

There are a couple of things to look at after the results come in on election night that can shed light on this one way or another:

• Look for how the voter turnout % in Denton tracks with the turnout in Denton County and in the state as a whole. We can only safely say city-specific issues drove turnout in the event that the Denton voter turnout busts the curve statewide.
• Pay attention to the number of total voters in the city and compare that with the number of people who vote on the city-specific items. In such elections, there is predictable shrinkage from the top to the bottom of the ballot.

EARLY VOTING STATS
According to county records, 14,465 Denton city voters turned out to vote during the Early Voting period ending on October 31 (when I crunched that with the latest City of Denton voter database, the number shrunk to 14,117 and I haven’t spent the time to figure out the discrepancy). Compare that with 20,028 total voters (early and regular) from 2010 (the last Governor’s race – again, consider the above qualifications).

The average age of these voters is 51 – this more or less tracks with the 2010 demographics where the average age was 53.

There’s been much talk of the number of newly registered voters heading into this election. For my purposes, voters who have registered since May 1, 2014 (roughly 6 months prior to the registration deadline for this election) are counted as a newly registered voter. There have been 4509 of those new voters registering during that time. As of right now, only 919 of them have voted – that’s only 20% of them. The average age of all the newly registered voters is 29, but the average age of those who have showed up to vote so far is 32.

UNT was home to an early voting polling site. 1460 of the city of Denton early voters voted at UNT – that accounts for 10% of all the early voters in the city of Denton. The average age of those voting at UNT is 29. Over half of the 919 newly registered voters who early voted did so at this UNT site – 469 of them.

We won’t know until Tuesday night what percentage of total voters voted early, but the trend has been increasing in recent years. 64% of all 2012 voters from the city of Denton voted early in that election. If early voters account for 64% of this election’s total vote, we can expect to see 22,601 total voters after the polls close on Tuesday. That would only be slightly up from the 2010 total of 20,028 voters – not the historic voter turnout some are already claiming.

We will soon find out. Go vote if you aren’t counted as part of 14,465 of your fellow citizens who already have!