Texas Early Voting Updated
Early voting began in Texas today. By 1:00 today, 50,000 people had voted in blue Harris County (think Houston).
You can vote anywhere in Harris County and check out this map of how long the wait is at each polling place. They have a new Democratic elections administrator who is doing a great job so far.
My county – Fort Bend – is a disaster because the machines weren’t working. Our election administrator is totally incompetent. He was hired by the Republicans and they have an ingrained ability to pick incompetent people. The good news is that he might as well hand in his resignation the day the votes are canvassed because Democrats will pick the next elections administrator.
I’m feeling good about Texas voting right now. We have registered 1.8 million new voters since 2016 and 585,156 since September 1st. Analysis from targetsmart shows that 60% of these voters are either under the age of 25 or people of color, groups that lean Democratic.
Hearing anything in your area?
UPDATE: Harris County voted 67,000 in 2016 on the first day of early voting. Today they voted 128,000 with an hour still left to vote. FINAL First day in Harris County 169,517. I am stunned.
I received 2 separate calls (one Beto and one TX DNC) to encourage early voting–which I did via mail ballot last week. No calls from Republican sources. This is Pflugerville. I would love to see TX flip!
1There’s an early voting location in the community center in my neighborhood. I took a bike ride around the ‘hood today and went past the community center a couple of times and saw that the line didn’t look very long, just 2-3 people standing outside the door talking with an election worker.
My neighborhood is in the Clear Lake/NASA area and has voted pretty solidly Republican in the past. I see a fair number of Biden signs around here, though, so that may be changing.
2Here in Fort Collins, CO, blue city in a red county, mainly because there’s a university in town, we had some problems at a drop box on Sunday. Seems there was a crowd protesting the mask ordinance at the county courthouse which is where one (of several) dropbox is. Some folks wanting to drop off their ballot said they were blocked from doing so by lots of red hats yelling at them. I’ll be dropping mine off at the police station later today as soon as the wife gets hers done.
And then I’m signed up to be an election judge at one of the drop boxes in town from 10/30-11/3. Those’ll be 12-hour days I’m afraid, except for 11/3 which will be 13 hours. Never done that before. Should be interesting.
Every registered voter in the state will have received their ballot in the mail by now. CO has been doing this for several years and I don’t recall there being any problems with voter fraud. A few issues with mis-printed ballots but that’s to be expected when the low bidders get the jobs.
3What’s the deal with the TX GOP now suing to keep Harris Coy ty from having drive thru voting?
4Been pushed polled by Congresswoman Lizzy Fletcher’s opponent 4 times. Twice today.
Have also been called by the CWA and the AFL-CIO to remind me to vote for Lizzy.
5I am in Kane County, IL and mail-in/early voting is easy-peasy. I dropped off my ballot at the County Government Center without a problem. Later I was able to track it online to make sure it was received properly and will be counted. The line for early voters was long, but not terrible for the folks who want to vote in person. Our area is basically purple. There are diehard red and diehard blue voters. Sometimes one side wins, sometimes the other. I am optimistic that blue will prevail this time. There are very few Trump signs around (though there was a Trump rally at the County Fairgrounds recently).
6I’m sure glad no political organization or candidate has my phone number. I absentmindedly gave it out just once and I had to change my number to stop the calls. Live and learn.
7First time mail-in voter in PA. The law was changed last year thanks to Dem Gov. Tom Wolf. I delivered it to the Post Office and then tracked it online to see that it was received and recorded. Took a week, but it was.
8Saw news report of voters in Georgia standing in early voting lines for 11 hours. Unconscionable!
I voted in Austin this afternoon. It was a 45 minute wait, but worth it. Same for my husband when he voted this morning.
9I couldn’t find numbers for voters in Alaska but there have been lots of mail-ins and early voting already. I sent my absentee ballot back on Friday.
I’ve found it interesting here in western Washington State with yard signs. There are plenty of Republican candidates with yards signs quite visible, but I have only seen three…a huge yard sign on a trashy trailer, a huge flag flying on one side of a pickup truck (with an equally huge American flag on the other) and a bumper sticker on another truck…for Trump. All the yards and places that had Trump signs four years ago are conspicuously bare.
Also, regarding Culp, the Republican candidate trying to defeat Jay Inslee (Yeah, good luck with that one.) is a high school dropout, the police “chief” of a one cop redneck town of 1,100 people in eastern Washington and is every bit a typical Trumpster. He has hit all the Trumpish talking points regarding gun laws, and he’s going to restore our (their) God given rights to…whatever.
10Took my ballot yesterday to the official drop box closest to us, in the Nugget supermarket. (A great store which always makes the list of best places to work in the country – often top 20 – they treat staff really well and have lots of people who’ve worked there as long as I have lived in Davis.) Of course Davis, home of UC Davis, is a bright blue community, sort of the anti-matter version of The Other Aggieland down in Brazos County!
11Go Blue Texas! Do it for Ms. Juanita Jean Herownself and Mr. Glen Maxey. Do it for yourselves, your children and grandchildren’s future.
12A friend of mine is a nurse at Texas Medical Center she tweeted this out earlier.
“Interestingly, they opened a (apparently new) location in the Texas Medical Center that’s dead center between several hospitals so literally thousands of hospital employees (myself included) were suddenly able to literally walk there from work.”
This is GREAT!
13We voted on Tuesday at the town hall dropbox. It’s very quiet, as always, here. But no one cares about CT except for our two amazing senators, Blumenthal and Murphy.
14Just saw a report on Lawrence O’Donnell (MSNBC) stating that 97% of the folks in Travis County (think Austin) who are eligible have registered to vote. Austin is blue…be interesting to see what percentage of the 97% turn out. I’m feeling hopeful that we can flip Texas from red to blue this year even though I live in deep red East Texas. One bright spot is a good Dem candidate giving dumbass Louie Gomert a run for his money. His name is Hank Gilbert. Send a little cash his way if you can.
15The most recent update on the US Election Project’s Early vote statistics is
Last Report: 10/12/2020
Source: https://earlyvoting.texas-election.com/Elections/getElectionDetails.do
Texas voters have cast 251,284 mail ballots.
Nationwide, as of 10/14/2020 12:04 AM Eastern Time, Voters have cast a total of 12,569,955 ballots in the reporting states.
16In Oregon we got our voter’s guide in the mail last week. Ballots will be mailed out tomorrow, hopefully will have by the weekend. I’m ready to fill mine out and will drop off at the county courthouse, one of two drop boxes in my town of 10K (the other being city hall). I could mail it but the courthouse is across the street from the post office, so…
17Vic @7, et al, I’ve made several rounds of ActBlue donations and a few direct ones, mostly to Texas Democrats and Biden.
My ‘reward’ has been to get absolutely inundated with emails, texts, and presumably telephone calls [on two lines, never answer]. Literally hundreds upon hundreds of them. From dozens of candidates, some I’ve never heard of. Sonuvabitch!
—I’ve been so goddamned pissed I halted any further donations.
The Biden campaign apparatus has been the worst offender by far. I get continual texts and emails from ‘Joe, Kamala, Barack, Michelle’, and dozens of other ‘names’ beseeching me for dinero, online things and whatever. My fingers get tired deleting them all. Sonuvabitch!
I made the huge mistake of using a ‘main’ email address, now I can barely find my important emails amongst the trash. And from previous campaigns I know it will continue a long time.
I even am one who uses the “filtering” capabilities of my email programs [Thunderbird and Outlook] to dump emails straight into folders, but with these political ones the addresses mutate aroun,d so you can add one to a filter but there’ll be others coming. Sonuvabitch!
One particular irritant has been the damned stream of texts on an old ‘prepay by the minute and text’ cell phone that eats up my balance in a couple of weeks, costing me serious money. Used to be that $25-50 lasted me all effing year on that phone, now it’s being eaten up in less than a month [and a text = 1/3minute talk time]. Sonuvabitch!
Yeesh, you simply cannot avoid the major major aggravations of effing ‘modern’ life…
18I voted in person around noon. I am very leery of Texas Republican dirty tricks and decided that the best way to be sure my vote counted was to go to an early voting station and used the machine after what seemed like an hour-long wait.
Can we hope that this is the first time since 1976 that Texas votes blue? (And wouldn’t THAT prove to be a historical “accomplishment” for the fellow resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?)
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