Nearly 50% of registered voters in Texas have already cast their vote in the 2024 General Election, even though this year’s early voting period was six days shorter than in the 2020 election.
These numbers indicate a strong interest in this year’s election, according to SMU political science professor Matthew Wilson.
“Voter enthusiasm is pretty high. There’s a lot of interest, whether driven by admiration for one of the candidates or fear or loathing of one of the candidates. For a variety of reasons, people seem eager to cast their ballot,” Wilson said, per WFAA.
Although the number of early voters did not top the 2020 election numbers, it was substantially larger than the number of early voters in the 2016 election. The surge in absentee voting in 2020 was influenced, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly 9 million of the 18,623,931 registered voters in Texas—about 48.51%—cast an early ballot this year, compared to 9,702,263 in 2020.
Some counties set records for the number of early voters.
Rockwall, the smallest county in Texas, had the strongest showing in the DFW area, with 60% of voters casting early ballots.
Denton County reported 378,973 early voters (57.28%), and Collin County reported 435,403 (58.15%).
No records were broken in Dallas and Tarrant Counties, but voter turnout was strong.
In Dallas County, 659,333 persons voted early, about 44.93% of the registered voters.
In Tarrant County, 658,556 voters cast an early ballot, roughly 50.29% of all registered voters in the county.
The voter turnout for the 2024 election may exceed the total number of voters in Texas during the 2020 election, which was approximately 11.3 million. This represented about 67% of the state’s 16.95 million registered voters at that time. Since then, the number of registered voters in Texas has increased by roughly 1.67 million.
Polls will be open on Election Day, November 5, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
