A look at the Absentee ballot returns from the competitive SD 16 race shows a continued low-turnout election, with political and ethnic representation similar to the Primary.
The following chart identifies the number of votes cast by Democrats, Republicans and Other voters. There is also a counting of “Demplus” and “Repplus” which are the base partisan voters plus any voters who are registered independent, but act like a partisan voter by, for example, pulling a Democratic ballot or donating money to Obama.
In these partisan breakdown you see the same low turnout for non-partisan voters (dropping from 21% down to 13%) as was in the primary, and similar numbers for Democratic and Republican voters. There are also a large number of voters (about 19,000) that have not yet voted in this runoff despite voting in the Primary and another set (of about 30% of early returns) that are voters who cast ballots in this runoff despite not voting in the first round. This is consistent with what we have seen in other local elections.
In terms of ethnicity, this election still sees Latino voters underperforming registration. This is not something indicative of this campaign in particular, as Latinos in this area have not shown high turnout except in Presidential General Elections.
Results should be posting tonight, with the first tallies coming from the early absentees represented in these data tables. From those the consultants and media may start drawing conclusions about the direction of this race, although it is possible that the final vote will not be known for days.