The 2019 election has begun, or at least the early voting portion of the election is underway. Once known as “absentee voting” and largely restricted to the elderly and those vacationing on Election Day, absentee voting has now morphed into “early voting” for ease of convenience. Early voting has become an essential component of our electoral process over the last few decades, for better or for worse.

By way of illustration, early voting in Presidential elections was all of seven percent of the vote total in 1992, thirty percent in 2008, and nearly thirty-seven percent in the 2016 Presidential election. Louisiana has followed somewhat behind the national trend but early votes continue to increase as a percentage of the total number of votes. In the 2015 October primary and November runoff, early voting accounted for twenty-one and twenty-three percent of the total number of votes cast, respectively. You can safely bet that in Louisiana’s two remaining 2019 elections, votes from last Saturday to this Saturday will exceed a quarter of the total votes cast, perhaps even a third.

So early voting in Louisiana has become enormously important in the final vote totals, but there’s one thing more you should know – the cumulative early voting statistics are published by the Secretary of State’s Office every day during this voting period. These voting totals are currently up through the previous day’s closing of the polls. The press and the election experts know this and they can’t wait to begin predicting the outcome of the election based on early voting results.

So now you have one more reason to vote this week. In addition to eliminating the possibility that something unforeseen could happen which might prevent you from voting on Election Day, and avoiding the inconvenience of having to vote around all those college home football games being played on October 12th, you should now consider voting early to help establish conservative momentum. That’s momentum which translates into success not just for our gubernatorial candidates, but for all Republicans up and down the ballot. Now that’s the best reason of all to get out there and VOTE NOW!

UPDATE: The Secretary of State’s Office is reporting that on the first day of early voting in the October 12, 2019 election, just this past Saturday, the number of votes cast was two and a half times higher than it was in 2015!

LOUIS GURVICH, Chairman
Republican Party of Louisiana