Voting already qualifies for record book
With Election Day still to come, Texas set a record Friday for the most votes ever cast in an election in the state, and Bexar County was on course to set its own high-water mark.
Statewide, some 9.03 million people had voted as of Friday morning — about 64,000 more than in the 2016 presidential race, the secretary of state’s office reported.
Texas, which has been notorious for low turnout, is the second state to exceed its 2016 vote total, following Hawaii.
As many as 3 million more voters are expected to cast ballots by the end of Election Day on Tuesday.
In Bexar County, more than 568,000 votes had been cast at polling sites as of 1:30 p.m. Friday, the final day of early voting in Texas.
The figure does not include mail ballots or the 175,000 votes County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said she expected to be cast on Election Day.
Four years ago, Bexar County voters cast about 598,000 ballots during early voting, on Election Day and by mail.
“We are making history. It’s real. Bexar County is voting,” Callanen said.
Callanen based her estimate of 175,000 Election Day votes on previous elections and on growth in Bexar County’s registered voter roll, which has increased 12.6 percent over the past four years.
Adding her projection to the early voting total and the 85,000 mail ballots received as of Friday suggests the county’s final vote tally could reach 828,000 — a 38 percent increase over 2016.
And that’s a conservative estimate: It doesn’t account for 20,000 mail ballots distributed to voters but not yet returned to the county elections department.
The robust numbers reflect an urgency that was evident Friday at the Maverick Library, an early voting site on the Northwest Side.
Marissa Lopez, 26, a college student, said she originally intended to vote on Election Day, as she had in the past two presidential elections. But this year,
the prospect made her uneasy.
“This election has a lot of tension,” Lopez said. She worried that the mood in polling places on Tuesday could be “unpredictable.”
She remembered the long lines that marked the first few days of early voting, and she saw them as a good sign.
“More people are involved,” she said. “Every American should go out and vote.”
At the AT&T Center, one of the county’s voting “megacenters,” Tom Philips, 76, and his wife, Virginia Lees, 73, said they had been traveling this month and had made a point of returning to San Antonio in time to vote.
“We like to vote early. It just depends on where we are. And we had to vote here because we’re Texas residents. We were in Tucson yesterday,” Lees said.
“We left several places to get here on time,” Philips added.
‘Once in a lifetime’
The surge in turnout across Texas has been fueled by the addition of nearly 2 million registered voters since 2016, many of them under age 45. The voter rolls grew more than twice as fast as the state’s population, which increased 5 percent over that time.
Now, those new voters are showing up at the polls.
“If there’s a truism in political science, it’s that young people don’t vote,” said Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, an assistant dean at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. “What it says is, this is a special election. We always say every election is a once-in-a-lifetime election, but this one really is. And the fact that you’re seeing youth turnout go up really speaks to that.”
While Texas has exceeded the raw number of votes from 2016, turnout among all registered voters stands at 53.1 percent — compared with 59.4 percent four years ago. But Election Day hasn’t arrived yet, and some experts predict turnout as high as 70 percent when all the votes are in.
“We’re going to see record levels of votes cast,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University. “It’s not obvious who’s been benefiting or hurt by it. One thing is clear: Turnout is up, and I attribute that to the president and his candidacy and the circumstances — people think this is an incredibly important election.”
The statewide numbers largely have been driven by voters in and around the state’s five major cities. Harris County had recorded about 1.35 million ballots as of Friday morning — an all-time record for the county, which kept polls open for 24 hours leading into the final day of early voting.
Nationwide, about 860,000 voters under the age of 29 have cast ballots so far, according to a study by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
Matthew Wilson, an associate professor of political science at Southern Methodist University, said young voters have been courted extensively by the Democratic Party, notably during the 2018 Senate contest between former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Sen. Ted Cruz.
That race increased political engagement among young people, and this year they showed up during early voting, he said.
“Younger voters are not so much in the habit — as older voters are — of voting on Election Day,” Wilson said. “Early voting doesn’t at all seem strange or outside the norm. For older voters, it’s a bit of an adjustment.”
It’s unclear how the early voting totals will affect the outcome. Democrats tend to favor early and mail-in voting, experts say, while Republicans are expected to make a big showing in person Tuesday.
Voters with disabilities
Despite the high vote totals in Bexar County, some voters with disabilities and their advocates have complained the elections department did not provide adequate signage at polling sites to promote availability of curbside voting.
A group of deaf Bexar County residents showed up at Callanen’s news conference Friday, demanding video sign-language interpretation at all voting sites to ensure equal access for the deaf.
“You’re discriminating against the deaf. Why?” Yenter Tu, a deaf man and designated representative of the county’s deaf community, said in sign language.
Tu asked why hearing-impaired voters can access free sign-language services only at the elections headquarters downtown.
Callanen said her department, in talks with the deaf community, identified San Antonio College as a voting site where signlanguage assistance is provided. But Tu and advocates have said the presence of an interpreter there has been spotty.
Callanen said she met with disability groups as the county prepared to purchase new voting machines last year. Her staff, at the deaf community’s request, asked that video capability for sign-language assistance be added to the machines, “which makes a whole lot of sense,” Callanen said.
“So we sent that to the national voting equipment companies. But we have not seen or heard anything from that,” she said.
Election Day
On Tuesday, the county will operate 302 polling places from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
For more information, call 210335-VOTE (8683) or go to bexar.org/elections, where there is a list of voting locations. Bexar County voters can vote at any site.
The Express-News Voter Guide and other election resources are at ExpressNews.com/politics.