Kerr County early voting opens 42% ahead of 2022 pace

Kerr County voters turned out in force Monday, the first day of early voting for the Nov. 3 general election. According to the Texas Secretary of State’s office, 2,522 people cast ballots in person.

That’s 750 more than the 1,772 who voted in person on the first day of early voting in the 2022 midterm, an increase of 42%.

Monday’s count alone equals about 18% of the 14,166 in-person early votes Kerr County recorded across all 12 days of early voting four years ago.

The state’s figures don’t yet show how many mail ballots Kerr County has received this year. Mail made up a large share of the first day in 2022: 946 mail ballots had come in by the end of Day 1, which brought that day’s total to 2,718.

How 2022 played out

Final 2022 figures from the Secretary of State’s office give a sense of where this year’s numbers could go:

• 15,535 Kerr County voters cast ballots early, in person or by mail. That was 39.8% of the county’s 39,036 registered voters.
• 6,855 more voted on Election Day.
• That made 22,390 ballots in all, for turnout of 57.4%.
• Nearly 7 in 10 Kerr County voters (69.4%) cast their ballots early.

In 2022, turnout was highest on the first day and fell off gradually through the first week. Fewer than 500 people voted that Saturday, and no ballots were cast on Sunday. In-person voting held between 1,000 and 1,100 a day for most of the second week, then rose to 1,590 on the final Friday.

Statewide picture still incomplete

As of Tuesday morning, the state’s first-day statewide totals were missing most of the votes from several of Texas’ largest counties. Harris, Tarrant, Collin, Fort Bend and El Paso counties, with about 5.9 million registered voters combined, had each reported fewer than 15 in-person voters.

Among large counties that had reported, first-day in-person turnout ran from 2.78% in Montgomery County to 5.02% in Denton County.

Voting continues

Early voting runs through Friday, Oct. 30. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3.

The Lead will update early voting numbers daily throughout the early voting period.