Travis County reaches 90% voter registration goal

Nearly every voting-eligible Travis County resident has registered to vote in advance of the November elections,alocal official declared.

Bruce Elfant, the county’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, told reporters: “Since the 2012 election, we’ve added over 80,000 registered voters, which helps us get over our 90 percent voter registration goal,” set in January 2016.

As of Oct. 10, Elfant specified, his office had counted 713,871 registered voters, which he described as about 89.9 percent of the county’s citizens eligible to vote. At that time, Elfant said, an additional 11,000 applications had yet to be processed, and more applications would come in before the voter registration deadline of Oct. 11. We asked Elfant to share his math. Elfant told us that he started from a U.S. Census Bureau estimate indicating that, in 2015, the county was home to 778,077 citizens of voting age and then