The latest LA City Clerk numbers are showing three strong trends that now speak to HIGHER turnout for the May runoff, just a week away:
- Ballot Requests are up. The city has issued 737,421 ballots countywide for the Runoff, compared to 662,341 at this point for the Primary.
- Ballot returns are up. Using revised calculations, turnout is up across the board for the Runoff. (full tables available here: LA 8-DAYS OUT WORKSHEET)
- 23% of the current mailed in ballots come from voters that did not participate in the Primary. This is lower than the 33% from 2005, but still important.
Seen graphically, this turnout is hitting a trend that should create a 3-4% increase in final turnout for the May 21st Runoff.
While turnout is up, the ethnic breakdown of the vote is identical to the primary election mail ballot returns at this point, as can be seen in the following chart. This differs from what was seen in 2005 where the overall 6% turnout increase was driven by a spike in Latino participation.
One factor that jumps out is the large number of voters (23% currently) that have cast Runoff ballots but not participated in the Primary – with the largest percentage of “new” votes coming from young people. This phenomenon was reviewed in this blog posting by looking back at 2005 returns which saw 33% of the electorate being “new” to the election counter-balanced by 21% of the Primary voters not voting in the runoff. The 23% “new” voters is not as great as 2005 and we won’t know until after the election how many Primary voters fail to turnout.
The full tables show Total, Latino, Asian, African American and White mail ballot returns compared to the Primary for each council district, region of the city and neighborhood. These tables are available here: LA 8-DAYS OUT WORKSHEET