As of Friday, 28,949 ballots have been cast in the 2024 Primary. Predictions are that another 30,000, or so voters will go to the polls tomorrow.
During the early voting period, 4,251 voters voted by mail and 24,698 voters cast ballots at the 33 early voting locations. Of those who mailed in their ballots, 3,741, or 88% were Democrats, leaving only 510 Republicans who used mail in ballots.
The El Paso County Democratic Party targeted 8,620 voters who requested mail in ballots with get-out-the-vote (GOTV) messaging to get them to the polls. Of the voters the Party targeted, 2,841 (33%) cast a ballot.
As is the case in El Paso, more Democratic Party voters have voted, as of Friday.
The average age of the voter is 63 years old. For the Democrats, 64 years old was the average age of the voter. For the Republicans, the average age of the voters was 61 years old.
First time voters came out for both parties. About 3% of the voters who have voted were first-time voters. These were made up of one percent Republicans and two percent Democrats.
The early voting period for tomorrow’s Super Tuesday election ended on Friday. Tomorrow is Election Day. Here is what we know about who has voted so far. As of Friday, 15% of the ballots cast were mailed in. The rest of the ballots were cast at early voting locations over the last eleven days of voting.
By Voting Day
Of the eleven voting days during the early voting period, the last day, or March 1, was the busiest by far. The least busy day was Sunday, February 25.
By Voting Center
The busiest early voting location was the YWCA on the west side. The least busy location was the Agua Dulce Community Center.
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Who Are The Voters
The female voters, as expected, outperformed their male counterparts with slightly more than 1,300 female voters than male voters casting a ballot.
The women Democrat voters also outperformed their male counterparts on the Democratic ticket.
However, for the Republicans, it was the male voter that outperformed the Republican female voter.
As part of our coverage of Super Tuesday 2024, we have put together a voting tool where voter information can be looked up by anyone. We looked at the list of who has voted this year and here are select names of voters who have voted through Friday. Richard Dayoub, the former president of the El Paso Chamber of Commerce voted on February 20 at the YWCA West Side branch. Beto O’Rourke and his wife also voted on February 20. Both voted at UTEP. Congresswoman Veronica Escobar voted on February 24 along with two family members at the County Coliseum. Woody Hunt voted on February 23 at the YWCA West Side branch. El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser voted on March 1. He voted at The Shoppes At Solana. Outgoing El Paso Sheriff Richard Wiles voted on February 20. Wiles voted at the YWCA West Side location. All cast Democratic Party ballots, including Hunt.
KTSM’s Chief Meteorologist, Robert Bettes voted on March 1. Bettes voted at The Shoppes At Solana. Stephanie Valle, co-anchor at KVIA voted on February 28. She voted at the courthouse. Bob Moore, founder of El Paso Matters voted on March 1. Moore’s wife also voted on March 1st. Both voted at UTEP. Joining Moore is multimedia editor Angela Korchega who also voted on March 1. Kochera voted at The Shoppes At Solana. Aaron Montes of KTEP also voted on March 1. He voted at the Marty Robbins Recreation Center.
For a full list of the voters who have voted so far, go to our early voting tool on El Paso Votes. Because of the amount of data, the tool may be slow to load on your device. Keep in mind that if your device does not have enough memory, you may receive an “out of memory” error message. We have found that if you reload the page, it usually clears out the error message on the second, or third try.
The reason for the error, is that our tool loads all of the data to the memory of your device. Once the data has loaded, use the search box found on the top right-hand of the data grid to narrow your list. You can type in first, last or a combination of first and last names to look through the data.
Where The Voters Live
The early day voters came from 28 zip codes. The zip code with the most voters was 79936 with almost 28% of the voters. The zip code with the least voters was 79908. Zip code 79908 also had the lowest turnout for both the Democrats and the Republicans. Only one voter cast a ballot on the Democratic Party ticket and three voted on the Republican ticket in 79908.
For the Democrats, zip code 79936 had the largest turn out with over 3,000 voters.
For the Republicans, the zip code with largest turn out was 79912 with a little over 1,300 voters.
How They Compare To 2018 And 2020
As of Friday, 31% of the voters who have voted so far did not vote in the 2020 Primary. When compared to the 2018 Primary, only 57% voted in 2018, leaving 43% of voters who did not vote in 2018.
In 2018, the early voters accounted for 5,923 (1.3%) ballots cast in that Primary. There were a total of 12,370 ballots cast in the 2018 Primary. Only 2.8% of the electorate voted in 2018.
However, in the 2020 Primary, 43,602 ballots were cast during the early voting period. Of those, 34,379 were on the Democratic Party ticket and 9,223 Republicans. By the last day of the 2020 election, 88,311 ballots had been cast. Of those, 69,788 were for the Democrats and 18,523 were for the Republicans.
Even with a low voter turnout in 2018, the early voter ballot accounted for 48% of the ballots cast in 2018. In 2020, 49% of the ballots cast were cast during the early voting period.
This suggests that if the trend were to hold for this election cycle, there will be about 60,000 ballots cast by the end of the day Tuesday. El Paso News expects a little over 30,000 voters to vote tomorrow.
Don’t forget tomorrow is Election Day. Polling stations will be open from 7:00am to 7:00pm.
We Will Begin Announcing Our Winner Predictions Starting At Seven
Based on the historical record of candidates leading during the early voting cycle usually prevail when the last ballot is cast, El Paso News will begin making winner predictions starting at about 7:15pm. Because historically, the winner of the Primary in the Democratic ticket goes on to win the election in November, many of the winners tomorrow will be taking office next year.
However, we expect the House of Representatives District 77 seat to end up in a runoff election.
Stay with El Paso News for the latest election news coverage.
Important Information to Know
There is important information to know for context to our data analysis. There are voters, for example members of the judiciary and certain law enforcement, that have the legal authority to withhold certain information, like date of birth, from their public voter history record. For those voters, the date of birth used by the County Elections Department results in an age that is over 100 years old. Other voters use business addresses for their voter records. This slightly skews the results of our analysis. It should also be noted that our data sets exclude voters who registered to vote after January 15.
Privacy Concerns
It has been brought to our attention that some voters feel their privacy has been violated by our online voting tool. The information we provide is freely available to anyone on the County Elections Department’s website and the complete set of voters including addresses and birth dates is available to anyone that requests it from the county. It should also be noted that the information we have compiled is used by the candidates running for office. Many of them pay a substantial fee to data brokers for access to the data that we provide as a free service to the community. Our intention in providing this information is the belief that a free democracy requires an engaged electorate with access to the important information that helps them make the decision to vote. We provide the data to help empower voters.
Disclosure
Each election cycle, El Paso News publishes the names of the political candidates that the technology company owned by Martín Paredes provides branding and technology services to. Although not required to, we provide this list to our readers for transparency purposes. Clients of Cognent have no influence over the stories we choose to cover. Click here for more details.