Saturday saw 2453 voters come to the polls for all jurisdictions Travis County (which is only 26 off from what the combined model predicted for today). That resulted in the 3 models converging a bit towards the average. It is remarkable stable and we're pretty much guarunteed at this point to see total early vote (for just Austin) to be between 20k-25k voters.
Expected Total Early Vote for City of Austin by Latest Model Run (Saturday)
The easy math is to just go with a 50/50 split but again, I'll be conservative and use the 48/52 early to e-day split, and produce the following projected TOTAL votes by model as of Saturday's data.
2006 mayoral model: 50,858 total votes
2008 council model: 43,475 total votes
Combined Avg model: 47,406 total votes expected for City of Austin
Resident commenter and UT math professor Lorenzo Sadun feels that we'll actually shift to more early vote than election day turnout this year, which would result in even lower total projected turnout than listed below. I'm not convinced that will happen as the city electorate has lagged the partisan elections in shifting their vote early. In 2006 the city was 33% early vote and 2008 had only moved to 43% early. Then again, it was about 75% early for last fall's presidential election so it's entirely possible that it will speed up the trend in which case, a 53%/47% early to election day split would result in something closer to just 43,000 votes total. |
