Voters are increasingly choosing to cast their ballots before Election Day, if given the option. And during this year’s general election, more than 80 million Americans took that option.
Of those voters, some 44 million ballots were cast early in-person and roughly 37 million were cast by mail, according to early voting data as of 8 p.m. ET Monday compiled by Michael McDonald at the University of Florida.
While the in-person early voting period has ended, the number of returned mail ballots will continue to increase — including after Election Day. Roughly 20 states plus Washington, D.C., accept and count mail ballots received after Election Day — usually if they are postmarked on or before Election Day.
One of the more surprising early voting patterns this year is the number of Republican voters who cast their ballots early in-person.
Historically, conservative voters have largely waited until Election Day to vote. In recent years, that has been fueled by rhetoric from former President Donald Trump, who has often maligned early and mail voting. However, ahead of this election, Republicans worked to get their voters more comfortable with early voting.
As expected, though, fewer people have voted by mail compared with 2020.
The last presidential election, which was held in the middle of a pandemic, was unique in terms of overall participation as well as voting methods, as various states expanded access to mail voting in an effort to avoid crowding at polling sites.
In the years since the 2020 election, some states have decreased access to mail voting, while other states made those pandemic-era voting changes permanent. The relative decrease in mail voting access is part of the reason that fewer people were expected to vote by mail this year.
All these changes in voting methods make predicting the overall turnout kind of difficult. McDonald wrote on his Substack Monday that he expects the percentage of the voting-eligible population in the U.S. to actually vote this year to be somewhere between 2016’s and 2020’s turnout, at 64.7%.
Copyright 2024 NPR
