Early Voting Shatters Records
Statewide Totals Surpass Entire 2016 Count
By Will Johnson
Messenger Reporter
HOUSTON COUNTY – Houston County, along with the rest of the state of Texas, has shattered all sorts of early voter turnout records in the 2020 election.
The final, unofficial voting tallies show that a total of 7,107 ballots have been cast in early voting for Houston County. This was comprised of 6,266 early votes and 841 ballots-by-mail. The unofficial total represents 52.86% of the 13,444 registered voters in the oldest county in Texas.
The numbers revealed 5,387 early votes were cast at the Crockett Senior Citizens Center with 4,895 cast in the Houston County Hospital District election, 448 votes cast in the Crockett ISD election and 898 votes cast in the Latexo ISD bond election.
There were also 503 early votes cast in Grapeland with 265 ballots cast on Thursday, Oct. 29 and 238 on Friday, Oct. 30. In Lovelady, 203 early votes were cast on Thursday, Oct. 29 and 172 were cast on Friday, Oct. 30.
During the early voting period of the 2016 General Election, there were 4,845 ballots cast with an additional 306 absentee ballots received. The final tally showed 7,773 votes were cast in the last presidential election.
Another way of looking at this is before the first vote is cast on Election Day 2020, Houston County is only 666 votes shy of the entire amount of votes counted during the 2016 General Election.
Moving to the state level, the Texas Secretary of State has indicated there are 16,955,519 registered voters in Texas.
By the time early voting finished up on Friday, 8,745,956 Texans had cast their ballots. An additional 973,144 ballots by mail had been received which brought the total of early votes to 9,719,100 or 57.32% of registered voters – surpassing the total number of votes cast in 2016.
In 2016, the state had 15,101,087 registered voters and according to the Texas Tribune, “… 8,969,226 Texans cast a ballot in the general election. Texas has added 1.8 million registered voters since the 2016 election, and this year’s overall percentage turnout is still below 2016’s turnout of 59.4%.
Will Johnson may be contacted via e-mail at [email protected].
