| Monday saw 5488 voters come to the polls for all jurisdictions Travis County which was much higher than expected. We're talking by like over 1000 voters!
This has an interesting effect of making me really just go back through the models to see what what that says. Traditionally, the last day of early voting is almost exactly twice that as the second to last day. If that trend is the more powerful one, then the final early turnout will be 2000-3000 votes higher than either of the models would suggest even with the Monday data plugged in. I feel this is probably the case and as such have overridden those number.
In addition, thanks to another local consultant, I've got some real numbers on the percentage of actual City of Austin votes included in amount that is reported by the Travis County election division each day (which include non-city of austin voters from other cities and jurisdictions holding elections in the county). Unsurprisingly, the Austin vote is 83% of that number, which is within a percent of the ration from the 2006 mayor's race. I'm glad to see that some numbers are staying predictable so I'm plugging that into the models now as well.
Expected Total Early Vote for City of Austin by Latest Model Run (Monday)
Based on an predicted 48%/52% split of early vote to election day vote produces the following projected TOTAL votes by model as of Sunday data. This has the greatest potential for error as it's the least predictable part of the model.
2006 mayoral model: 57,696 total votes
2008 council model: 56,092 total votes
Combined Avg model: 56,617 total votes expected for City of Austin
This is the effect that the last two days of early voting can have on overall numbers. Maybe undecideds have decided and are now voting and had been holding off. Maybe weekend field efforts had an effect. Maybe all those weekend McCracken "violation fliers" got some people to the polls. Who knows, but with more data I think that it is now clear that we are going to pass 25,000 early votes within the City of Austin (which we won't be able to absolutely confirm until the Saturday vote or if we're able to get our local consultants to match the data before then. |
