Another county’s results are plotted below, and while it’s too soon to assume a lot from just two counties, there is still a lot of election day votes cast for Cain, as a proportion of his total. Perry, Bachmann, and Huntsman look more like I’d have expected.
Interesting breakdowns of the vote totals by mode of balloting in Duval County, FL. Gingrich and Romney performed about the same in early, absentee, and election voting. Perry got a lot more absentee votes, no surprise there. As to Herman Cain? Most of his votes in Duval came on election day!
| Choice | Polling | Absentee | Early Voting | Provisional | Unscanned | Total | Percent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michele Bachmann | 43 | 155 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 206 | 0.24% |
| Herman Cain | 119 | 74 | 31 | 0 | 0 | 224 | 0.26% |
| Newt Gingrich | 23,005 | 5,433 | 5,307 | 0 | 0 | 33,745 | 38.72% |
| Jon Huntsman | 54 | 133 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 199 | 0.23% |
| Gary Johnson | 14 | 24 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 45 | 0.05% |
| Ron Paul | 3,821 | 1,206 | 662 | 0 | 0 | 5,689 | 6.53% |
| Rick Perry | 79 | 234 | 17 | 0 | 0 | 330 | 0.38% |
| Mitt Romney | 21,641 | 7,558 | 5,926 | 0 | 0 | 35,125 | 40.31% |
| Rick Santorum | 8,388 | 1,683 | 1,509 | 0 | 0 | 11,580 | 13.29% |
As the campaign turns to Florida, absentee and early in person voting will be the lede for the next few days.
As those of you who follow this area know, tracking early ballots in Florida is a frustrating exercise (both Michael McDonald and I have written about this in the past).
The state makes freely available at the state website detailed early in person returns including individual vote reports. This is what allowed us to post turnout rates by race, age, etc in previous elections.
No-excuse returns, however, remain restricted to campaigns and candidates, and there is no good reason why. In the past, I’ve been told that this is because of concerns over election day crime – after all, if you knew the address of someone who’d voted absentee, you could rob them on election day. Wait, I respond, you now have no-excuse absentee voting…
All my posts recently about no-excuse absentee ballots in Florida have relied in news reports and analysis of the Miami-Dade returns. Miami-Dade, Orange, and Pinellas all make their data easily accessible. Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, and Duval lag behind.
| Early in-person | File Location | Current turnout |
|---|---|---|
| Statewide | Florida DoE | 36,912 |
| Absentee | ||
| Statewide | Not available | – |
| Miami-Dade | Miami Dade Elections Main Page | 47,108 |
| Broward | Can’t find it | – |
| Palm Beach | Can’t find it | – |
| Hillsborough | Can’t find it | – |
| Orange | Orange County elections | 9,251 |
| Pinellas | Current elections page | 41,230 |
| Duval | Can’t find it | – |
I recognize the time pressures operating on local elections officials and I’m not trying to make more work for them. The frustrating thing is that the data are readily accessible at the state elections website, you just can’t get in to see them. And the local counties generate daily reports, some simply don’t post them.
Why does this matter? It matters to anyone who is trying to follow the election, report on the election, and mobilize citizens to participate in the election. For example, what does it mean when 41,230 absentee ballots have been returned in Pinellas and 47,108 in Miami-Dade, which is 2.5 times larger? (By the way, there are 220,024 registered Republicans in Pinellas and 367,298 in Miami-Dade, so it’s not all a difference of partisanship.)
Keeping this gate closed only benefits well-funded parties and candidates, and there isn’t any clear legal justification for embargoing the the information.
On the positive side, the names of the files follow regular patterns, so someone with more staff and programming skills than me could unpack these files (mainly PDFs) on a daily basis and track the returns.
Georgians begin no-excuse balloting today for the March 6 primary. There are nine candidates on the ballot.
I’ve blogged a few times about the unanticipated infrastructure demands created by early voting. Most elections offices are designed to handle a few hundred citizens with questions about registration or disabled citizens needing use special access machines, not thousands or tens of thousands of voters showing up to cast a ballot.
This story from Jackson County, MO, just outside of Kansas City, illustrates the problem.
Five election dates, new legislative districts thanks to the 2010 census and even seemingly simple things like generating new notification cards for every registered voter. And the November ballot – with a presidential race, several statewide races and initiatives, state legislative contests and possibly local ballot issues – is expected to be long.
The Democratic director of the board, Bob Nichols, noted “We had people lined up outside and in our office.” Tammy Brown, Nichols’s Republican counterpart, added “It is a crazy year.”
Adapt or die, as my colleague Doug Chapin often notes, and in this case, adaptation was easy. The story doesn’t note who saw the empty storefront across the street, but the Board has rented it, and just like that, more space for voting, shorter lines, and less stress on the elections staff.
A little mathematics and some web browsing skills, and it looks like somewhere between 8% and 17% of the ballots in Florida have already been cast.
Keep in mind that, as of today, four candidates (Bachmann, Cain, Huntsman, and Perry) were on these ballots, and three (Bachmann, Huntsman, and Perry) were still actively competing well into the absentee balloting period.
We’ll use Miami Dade County to make our calculations, but this same exercise can be done throughout Florida (and you can bet the Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum forces are making these calculations daily).
Miami Dade County, reports 42,149 absentee ballots returned as of close of business yesterday, totaling 32% of the 130,491 ballots mailed out. The Miami Herald reports 143,000 ballots voted statewide, just over 30% of absentee ballot requests.
Apologies to our regular readers for my absence for a few weeks. I’m back to update you on all things early voting.
Some of you may have seen an editorial in Roll Call that Rob Richie and I authored, arguing for ranked-choice voting in presidential primaries for overseas absentee ballots. If anyone has reactions, I’d love to hear them. I think this is a great idea, and I’m pondering whether I should work with Rich to push this more systematically in a few states for 2016.
Voting reform is pushing ahead in Connecticut. It looks like online voting registration–an initiative of the Pew Center on the States--will be put in place. The legislature may also relax no-excuse absentee voting requirements. This means my standing comment in powerpoint presentations about the Northeast may need to be amended!
Early voting rates in Ohio seem to be lagging behind 2008. Some local officials speculate that it may because of a fear that candidates will drop out, but I don’t find that particularly convincing. None of the leading four candidates is showing any signs of withdrawing at this point. As Mike Alvarez has argued in his book, it is probably because voters remain uncertain and candidate support is fluid in the Buckeye State.
Another Ohio controversy is brewing over changes to the period for early voting.