by: Grebner
Thu Oct 23, 2008 at 19:03:33 PM EDT
(bump! – promoted by Eric B.)
Just about 925,000 ballots have been requested from local Clerks, and about 45% of those have been voted and returned as of noon, Oct. 23. They’re coming back at a rate of about 4% per day, which makes sense given there are 12 days before the election.
About 15,000 requests are being received each day, so we’ll probably top out at just over 1 million ballots, or about 19% of all votes cast statewide. (I’m expecting 5.2 million votes.)
As I previously mentioned, Democrats seem to be holding their own or possibly slightly out-performing the other side.
Thes conclusions are based on data stored in a program maintained by the Secretary of State which helps local Clerks keep track of the ballots requested and returned. The data is not complete, because many Clerks of small units of government don’t participate, while other Clerks use only part of the system. I’ve made crude interpolations to fill in the gaps in the data.
I’ll try to post additional data each day through November 4.
UPDATE 10-24-2008: 49.9% of the ballots have now been returned to local Clerks.
UPDATE: 10-27-2008: 53.2% have been returned.
UPDATE: 10-28-2008: 57.1% have been returned.
UPDATE: 10-29-2008: 62.9% have been returned. It looks as if the precentage of returned ballots is about one percentage point higher among Democrats than Republicans, with independents lagging about 3 points further back.
UPDATE: 10-30-2008: 67.0% returned, of 1.02 million mailed out. It doesn’t look to me as if this curve will get very close to 100% by Tuesday. Normally, ballot return rate tends to taper off the final few days, but it will have to increase this year. Hmmmm?
UPDATE: 10-31-2008 – 71.1% returned. I really don’t get it – why isn’t the curve ramping up? Only three remaining days to return ballots, and we’re still almost 20% below the typical final return precentage of 90%. The problem doesn’t appear to be that a few Clerks haven’t processed all the ballots yet; the return rates are heavily clustered around 70%, with very few above 80%.
UPDATE: 11-3-2008 – 78.7% returned. Still not very good. It appears that lots of people APPLIED for absentee ballots who had never voted that way before, and they’re not doing a very good job of RETURNING them. That is, the return rate is very high among repeaters, but not among first-time applicants.
Based on PPC’s coding of partisan orientation, and looking only at municipalities where the data appears to be complete:
Democratic voters requesting ballots: 258,000. Returned to Clerk: 47.2%
Republican voters requesting ballots: 223,000. Returned to Clerk: 44.9%
Middle-of-the-road voters requesting ballots: 315,000. Returned to Clerk: 43.3%
UPDATE: 10/31/2008: The following chart looks at voters who have requested a ballot from one of the local Clerks who maintain their absentee list using the Secretary of State’s system – about 90% of the statewide total.
DEM% refers to my firm’s coding of their partisan leaning. From our polling this year, a rule of thumb has emerged many voters have shifted about 10% more Democratic than these estimates. What’s interesting to note is that the Republicans seem to have a tiny lead in getting their people to actually return their ballots, and that people at the very center of the political spectrum are holding back, possibly because there’s no one to nag them, or possibly because the voting takes longer for them because they don’t have a straight-ticket instinct to fall back on.
DEM% COUNT % RETURNED
0 131118 75.5
10 75887 70.5
20 55617 70.4
30 39576 68.7
40 46269 67.1
50 49783 64.3
60 48045 67.5
70 47280 69.7
80 51761 72.0
90 68124 70.8
100 226000 73.8
Leave a Reply