Bexar County is expecting a busy Election Day with a drop in early voting

With early voting now over, Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said Saturday that the county's vote count was down compared to the 2020 presidential election.

However, Callanen still predicts a high turnout on Nov. 5, in part because there were fewer early voting opportunities this year.

Due to COVID-19 precautions during the 2020 election, early voting was extended by one week and heavy emphasis was placed on absentee voting.

With that in mind, Callanen said the county received about 690,000 early and mail-in votes in 2020 — compared to 605,000 early and mail-in votes in 2024, although mail-in ballots are still counted as they are received.

That puts the county's voter turnout ahead of this year's Election Day at about 46.7%, Callanen said Saturday.

The overall voter turnout in the county in the 2020 election was 65.1%.

Callanen said it's unlikely Bexar County will reach that percentage in 2024.

But Election Day voting is expected to account for a much larger share of the total number of votes cast this year, she said, so the raw vote count is expected to be at least as high as 2020.

The unusual focus on early and mail-in voting meant that voter turnout on Election Day 2020 was significantly lower than expected, with about 84,000 votes cast, Callanen said.

“The key to this that we're looking at is Election Day in 2020 … which was, 'Where are the voters?'” Callanen said. “So let’s take a step back here and wait.”

This Tuesday, Callanen said the elections department plans to cast about 275,000 Election Day votes at the more than 300 voting locations in Bexar County — more than triple the number of Election Day votes cast four years ago.

She pointed to the 2022 midterm election, when Gov. Greg Abbott ran against Democrat Beto O'Rourke, as an example of how voting patterns have changed since the “anomaly” of 2020.

According to Callanen, about 151,000 votes were cast on Election Day during the 2022 midterms – nearly twice as many as on Election Day in the 2020 presidential election – even though voter turnout for the midterms was far lower overall.

Callanen said not only has early voting returned to a regular two-week window, but the 2021 Texas election law also makes absentee voting more complicated.

Compared to the 121,000 absentee ballot applications her office received in 2020, there are only 51,000 this year.

“We had never seen that (number of absentee ballot requests) and haven’t seen it since,” Callanen said of the 2020 increase.

(rounded to the nearest thousand) *Ballots sent by mail will be counted as they arrive

Bexar County is expecting a busy Election Day with a drop in early voting

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