March Primaries in Texas

As we’ve all heard and seen in the national news, turnout nationwide for the presidential primary elections and caucuses has been recordbreaking. Information provided by the Texas Secretary of State’s Elections Division offers a snapshot of Texas voters’ participation in the March 4, 2008 Presidential Primary Elections.

Democratic Party Primaries were conducted in 251 Texas counties at 8,247 election precincts. The 2,872,454 Democratic votes that were canvassed represents a 22.5% turnout of the state’s registered voters. The unofficial number of Democratic voters who cast their ballots during early voting was 1,284,009.

The Republican Party conducted presidential primaries in 243 counties at 7,959 election precincts. In the Republican Primary, 1,362,896 votes were cast which constitutes 10.7% of the state’s registered voters. More than 559,000 of the Republican voters cast their ballots during early voting.

The 33.2% turnout in the March 4 Primaries was bested only in 1988, when Texas conducted its first March Super Tuesday presidential primaries. That year, 35.8% of the state’s eligible voters participated in the primary elections. The actual number of votes cast in the 1988 primaries was 2,782,001, which fell far short of the 4,235,350 who actually voted in the March 4, 2008 primary. Subsequent presidential primaries have seen voter turnout ranging from 12.4% to 28.5%.

The Elections Division of the Secretary of State’s Office estimates the cost to date of the recent primaries to be in excess of $5,600,000, and the Division anticipates disbursing at least $2,000,000 more for the March 4 elections.

In October of 2002, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) became effective and created many new mandates on states and local governments. One of the key mandates for states was to develop and “implement a uniform, official, centralized, interactive, computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained, and administered at the State level.”

In response to the HAVA mandate, Texas developed the web-based Texas Election Administration (TEAM) system which is under the auspices of the Secretary of State’s Election Division. When the TEAM system first became available for counties to use, there were many technical difficulties to be resolved. The Secretary of State has worked diligently to correct the problems.

The ultimate test of the TEAM system occurred during the March Primary Elections. The system proved to work smoothly and produced 3000+ reports in the weeks leading up to the election; produced 720 voting list reports on the Friday before election day (most ever produced); processed 637,000 voter transactions through the Secretary of State’s offline county interface leading up to the election; accomodated a peak user count of 416 (record count) on election day; processed 45,000+ new voter certificates leading up to the election; and, provided 96,699 county searches on election day.

The Secretary of State’s website offers a multitude of information for election officials, poll workers, and voters. There were 159 counties who took advantage of the online poll worker training. A total of 2,887 election workers were trained through the system. On election day there were 672,585 viewers who went to the Election Division’s Online Voter Central webpage for voter information. The webpage aided 239,616 voters in locating their polling places.

For more information or questions regarding this article, please contact Nanette Forbes, Legislative Liaison, at 800-456-5974.