This article was corrected on December 7, 2024. Cassandra Hernandez vacated her District 3 seat, not 5 as originally published.
This is what we know about the voters with three days left to go in the 2024 El Paso city council election runoff. As of yesterday, Friday, December 6, 15,990 voters have cast a ballot in the runoff election. The voters are voting for the mayor and five city council seats.
The open city council seats are to fill the unexpired seats of two mayoral candidates – Cassandra Hernandez and Brian Kennedy. Hernandez vacated her District 3 seat to run for mayor. Kennedy, who is in the runoff election for the mayor’s seat against Renard Johnson, also vacated his District 1 seat.
The other open city council seats are Districts 3, 4 and 7.
As of yesterday, the women continue to dominate the voters with 52% of the women voters turning out to the polls. The average age of voters that have cast a ballot is 67 years old.
In the District 1 race between Alejandra Chávez and Monica Reyes, the average age of the voters is 66 years old. However, unlike the overall voters, in this district, the men are outvoting the women with 50.27% more men than women casting a ballot.
In the District 3 seat between Deanna Maldonado-Rocha and Jose Rodriguez, the average age of the voters is 70 years old.
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For the District 4 race between incumbent Joe Molinar and challenger Cynthis Boyer Trejo, the average age of the voters is 67.
Closing out the city council races is the race between Chris Hernandez and Lily Limón for the District 7 seat. The average age of the voter for this seat is 70 years old.
New voters, those that had not previously voted for candidates in their districts, are turning out to vote in Districts 1 and 5. Over 90% of previous voters have voted for candidates in the other races.
For the mayor’s seat between Brian Kennedy and Renard Johnson, the women account for 51.5% of the voters with the average age of the voters being 67. Over 92% of the voters turning out to the polls in the runoff election also voted the last time the mayoral seat was open.
About 98% of the voters that voted during early voting also voted on November 5. Many of those, about 92%, also voted in 2020. However, only 57% of the early voters voted in 2022.
Of the voters that have voted, 23% used mail-in ballots to cast their vote.
The last day to cast a ballot during the early voting period is Tuesday, December 10. Election Day is Saturday, December 14.