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Jo Clifton is the Politics Editor for the Austin Monitor.
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Voting enthusiasm continues
Thursday, October 25, 2018 by Jo Clifton
Monday saw a groundswell of voting for the Nov. 6 election, with about 6 percent of Travis County’s registered voters casting early ballots. But former political consultant Peck Young, who serves as director of the Center for Public Policy and Political Studies at Austin Community College, said we should wait until we saw the vote on Tuesday and Wednesday before deciding that the election would actually be historic. On Tuesday 35,239 voters, or about 4.5 percent, voted, and on Wednesday the number was 31,961, or 4.08 percent, for a total by Wednesday night of 93,814 votes cast, or 14.58 percent of the county’s registered voters. It wasn’t that easy to vote on Wednesday either. With nearly continuous rain, voters holding umbrellas were observed standing in a long line outside the Randalls on Ben White Wednesday afternoon. At Austin Community College, more than 1,700 voters cast ballots on both Monday and Tuesday, but that number had dipped only slightly to 1,582 on Wednesday. More than 5,000 voters cast ballots at the University of Texas Flawn Academic Center, and 2,800 more voted at the Perry-Castañeda Library in the first three days.
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