Sunday, November 2, 2008

Early Voting Summary

By a Collin County Early Voting Alternate Judge (D)

Typically, turnout during the second week of early voting is heavier than in the first week of voting. The turnout pattern for 2008 did not exactly follow the 2004 turnout pattern voting. Week one of 2008 had a slightly higher percentage of daily turnout, so early voting was a bit more front loaded in 2008 as compared to the 2004 turnout pattern. (See daily turnout table below)

Collin County had an impressive 49.9% early voting turnout of the 424,500+ registered voters in 2008, according to figures given on the Texas Secretary of State's website.

In the November 2004 election 246,617 (66.8%) of the 369,412 register voters cast a ballot in that presidential election, with 150,001, or 40.6% of 2004 registered voters, voting early in that presidential election year.

Date
Of
Election
Total Reg.
Voters
Total
Votes
Cast
Total
Turnout
% of
Reg
Voters
Early
Votes
Cast
Early
Vote
% of
Reg
Voters
Nov-00 300,426 177,673 59.1% 75,244 25.0%
Nov-04 369,412 246,617 66.8% 150,001 40.6%
Mar-08 380,570 124,614 32.7% 59,033 15.5%
Nov-08 424,500 356,580 84.0% 211,637 49.9%

October
Early
Voting
2004
Daily Early Turnout
2008
Daily Early Turnout
Early
Vote
Day
Daily
Hours
of
Voting
Actual
Daily
Vote
Totals
Daily %
of Total
Early
Turnout
Daily
Early
Vote
Turnout
Daily %
of Total
Early
Vote
Mon 9 9,137 6.09% 13,900 6.50%
Tue 9 9,491 6.33% 15,356 7.30%
Wed 9 9,257 6.17% 15,563 7.40%
Thu 9 9,090 6.06% 14,734 7.01%
Fri 9 10,293 6.86% 17,305 8.23%
Sat 12 15,102 10.07% 19,043 9.06%
Sun 5 5,524 3.68% 8,188 3.89%
Mon 12 13,739 9.16% 18,126 8.62%
Tue 12 15,326 10.22% 19,227 9.14%
Wed 12 15,621 10.41% 21,780 10.36%
Thu 12 16,606 11.07% 23,074 10.97%
Fri 12 20,815 13.88% 25,341 11.97%
Total
150,001 100% 211,637 100%
Final Numbers for 2008 Early Voting

A new CBS News national poll of likely voters (that includes those who've already voted plus likely voters) released on November 1st finds that Obama/Biden leads McCain/Palin by 13 points, 54 percent to 41 percent.

That margin reflects an increase of two points in the Obama-Biden ticket's lead from a CBS News/New York Times poll released Thursday October 30th.

Nationally, about one in five voters say they have already cast their vote, either in person or through the mail, and these early voters prefer the Democratic ticket by an even greater margin.

Obama leads among early voters, who have already cast their ballot, 57 percent to 38 percent, a nineteen point advantage.

Matching the names of people who voted in the 2008 Democratic primary vs. the Republican primary and the newly registered voters with the names of people who voted early through October 30th, we find that the Collin County voting pattern likely follows the national voting sentiment captured in the CBS News Poll.
Democratic 53,263 27.5%
Republican 38,082 19.6%
New Reg. 102,613 52.9%

The last day of early voting, October 31st, was the biggest early voting day of all, but the official data is not yet available on the Texas Secretary of State's website or from the county elections office. The "New Reg" number in the above table includes all the voters newly registered since the March 4th primary election, therefore party affiliation can not be determined. The general assumption is that a sizable portion of the newly registered voters voted for Obama/Biden.

The early voting experience was challenging for voters and election workers alike this year. The voter registration software application package, that Collin County purchased from Votec Corp. earlier this year and used for the first time in this election to look up voters in the main registration database, malfunctioned from the start.

Newly registered voters who presented their brand new orange voter's registration cards to election clerks at check-in could not be found by the by the "VoteSafe" client part of the Votec application being used by election workers to qualify voters at the polling place. The Carpenter Park Recreation Center Early Voting Location Judge (R) and Alternate Judge (D) quickly understood implications of the software malfunction early on the first day of early voting.

As a work-around solution, the Carpenter Park Recreation Center Alternate Judge phoned the County Elections Office Voter Lookup Hot Line to manually qualify each voter that VoteSafe failed to automatically qualify.

The voter's name and registration certification number was then manually written on the combination signature form and also separately written on a "tally" list so the elections office could later mark the voter's record as "voted." Fortunately, these manually qualified Carpenter Park voters experienced only minor delay of a few minutes in the check-in process. By the close of early voting on October 31 several hundred names had been written on the Carpenter Park "tally" list as "manually" qualified voters.

Unfortunately, Judges and Alternate Judges at a few early voting locations did not immediately understand that the failed voter qualification lookups were due to software malfunction. These Judges incorrectly required otherwise qualified voters to go through the time consuming process of completing a "provisional ballot" form. Voters at other locations were turned away and told to return later.

By the middle of the first week of early voting Sharon Rowe, the Collin County Election Administrator, had instructed all the early voting Judges that voters should not be turned away or told to fill out provision ballots when a voter's registration could be verified by calling the Elections Office Voter Lookup Hot Line.

Few of the new voters who filled out their voter registration cards in late September and early October, who were added to the registration database during October, could be qualified by election clerks through the normal VoteSafe automated check-in process. Thousands of recently updated existing voter registration records and newly added voter registration records in the county's main elections database could not be accessed by the "VoteSafe" application client.

Also read Reports detail Collin County Early Voting problems at the Collin Co. observer.

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