• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!
  • Welcome to our archives. No new posts are allowed here.

Early vote statistics - a tracker thread.

Tender Branson

DP Veteran
Joined
Jun 3, 2021
Messages
8,095
Reaction score
5,003
Location
🇦🇹 Austria 🇦🇹
Gender
Male
Political Leaning
Progressive
Prof. Michael McDonald from the University of Florida is tracking the early vote numbers from each state again.

Comparisons to 2020 should not be made under any circumstances, because Covid-2020 was an extreme outlier, with 2/3 of all voters voting early by mail/in-person and only 1/3 on election day.

This year, early voting will be around 30-50% or so of the total expected vote, much lower, and back to 2016 patterns.

Anyway, 12 million people have already voted early as of today.

» 2024 Early Voting UF Election Lab

election.lab.ufl.edu

This number will rise by millions each day now.
 
If we assume that total turnout will be around 160 million again (like in 2020), 40% early voters would mean ca. 64 million votes to be cast before election day.

Currently, it's 12 million.

Still 52 million more to go in the next two weeks.
 
Tender Branson said:
If we assume that total turnout will be around 160 million again (like in 2020), 40% early voters would mean ca. 64 million votes to be cast before election day.

Currently, it's 12 million.

Still 52 million more to go in the next two weeks.
Click to expand...
Early voting hasn't even started in almost 20 states.
 
On social media, certain self-described "experts" are making comparisons with 2020 early vote numbers ...

This is very dangerous and unscientific, because:

A) the early vote in 2020 was MUCH higher, therefore Democratic numbers among this larger electorate was much higher than usual, because it represented a larger sample of the overall electorate. These "experts" are now claiming Democrats are in trouble because the early vote so far is less Democratic than in 2020, but that was only to be expected as the share of early voting is down. It is totally possible that a much larger segment of Democrats will return to voting on election day again, after Covid.

B) despite the early voting numbers being released, and even by party registration in several states, we don't know how these people voted. A voter might be registered as a Democrat, but could vote for Trump. A voter registered as Republican could vote Harris, and there is an ever-growing number of Independents and we don't know how they voted.

So be very careful when interpreting these early votes by party, by race, gender or comparing them to 2020.
 
Teatime said:
Early voting is one thing, but none of those ballots should be opened and counted until the polls have closed on election day.
Click to expand...
The count shouldn't be publicised for sure. Not until the polls are closed in Hawaii.
 
Another factor is that Trump is now telling people to vote early. In 2020 he was pushing people to vote on Election Day, not early.
 
Teatime said:
Early voting is one thing, but none of those ballots should be opened and counted until the polls have closed on election day.
Click to expand...

It's complicated.

Because of the high early in-person vote and especially mail-in vote in 2020, many states decided to not only process early/mail-in votes way ahead of election day, but even start counting them way ahead of election day ... so that a comprehensive election result can be released on election day.

Otherwise, it would take days or weeks after election day to count these millions of mail-ballots, because verifying etc. takes quite some time.

How each state handles this (processing and the actual counting) can be seen here:

Table 16: When Absentee/Mail Ballot Processing and Counting Can Begin

Processing absentee ballots can begin before they are actually counted. This table shows when each state's can begin processing and counting absentee/mail ballots.
www.ncsl.org

Even though several states process and count early in-person/mail-votes way before election day, they can still only release results after poll closing on election day. Releasing any results before poll closing on Nov. 5 is a felony and can lead to lengthy prison sentences.
 
And in case anyone is interested, two states do NOT offer Early Voting.

Alabama
New Hampshire
 
Grand Mal said:
The count shouldn't be publicised for sure. Not until the polls are closed in Hawaii.
Click to expand...

I agree with this.

Usually, Indiana and Kentucky already start releasing results at 6pm or 7pm on election day. Many states are still voting then in the middle of the country or in the western parts. No state should release any vote counts until the last state (Hawaii) has closed all their polling stations. But in a federal country like the US, where everyone has their own rules, that's almost impossible to do. I think Congress would have to pass a law or a constitutional amendment, which every state/county has to follow, or risk prison.

And the news media would cry so hard too ... "We don't get any results to share with you for hours ... whine, whine, whine."
 
Above, I wrote that early vote comparisons with 2020 are dangerous and should be avoided at every cost.

But this is not completely true for all states.

Some states in the Western US are basically "all-mail-in" and almost exclusively "early-voting" states, such as Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Utah.

Colorado and Oregon also track early/mail-voting by party registration.

So, comparisons with 2020 makes sense in those states, but only when most votes are received, say ... 1 day before election day.

If for example the early vote in CO this year is 3 million, of which Ds are 35%, Rs are 30% and Indys are 35% ... but in 2020 it was 40% D, 30% R and 30% I ... then you could come to the conclusion that Republicans will do better this year.

But even this assumption is just "reading the tea leaves" ... because we still don't know how the Independent voters voted.
 
Here is the Georgia early-in-person vote so far, after 4 days:



After 4 days, more than 1.2 million there have voted early. 60% are registered White voters, 27% registered Black voters, 13% others.

Twitter users noted, that after 4 days of early voting in 2020, the Black share was 37-39%. Now 27%.

But once again, this is highly misleading, because in 2020, there were also more than 800.000 mail-in-ballots cast in Georgia at this time, but only 13.000 this year.

And do we know how the White people voted ?

No !

The 1.2 million so far are also 55% female. So, maybe the white voters, who are also more female, could be more Harris-leaning ...

And so on.

Therefore, do NOT draw any conclusions from these early vote numbers and don't make comparisons with 2020, because the setup in these two elections are so different because of the Covid-outlier.
 
We only will know what's going on when the whole puzzle is added together on election day and in the days after that ... when early/mail and election-day votes are added together.
 
The report can wait a week.
 
Teatime said:
The report can wait a week.
Click to expand...

Of course it can.

We here in Austria just had parliament elections 3 weeks ago.

There was election day, then the next day another 150.000 mail-ballots were counted and on Tursday, 4 days later, the remaining ballots who were cast in a different district than the voters'.

Election reporting takes some time and everything needs to be verified.

But it shouldn't take tooooo long, that's why several states allowed mail-in/early votes to be tabulated before election day already (but results are not released until poll closing on election day).
 
Tender Branson said:
If we assume that total turnout will be around 160 million again (like in 2020), 40% early voters would mean ca. 64 million votes to be cast before election day.

Currently, it's 12 million.

Still 52 million more to go in the next two weeks.
Click to expand...
Is there a point you are trying to make?
 
bongsaway said:
Is there a point you are trying to make?
Click to expand...

Nope, why ?

It's just the numbers that can be expected over the next few weeks until election day ...

Very few early votes are in so far (12 million), but we can expect millions each day now until ED to be added and every day more of them.
 
Tender Branson said:
Nope, why ?

It's just the numbers that can be expected over the next few weeks until election day ...

Very few early votes are in so far (12 million), but we can expect millions each day now until ED to be added and every day more of them.
Click to expand...
I still don't see the point. Early voting tells me people want to make sure their votes are counted. Democrats in cities tend to vote early. I live in a small town and I plan on voting the day early voting starts here.
 
About 15 million have now voted early by mail, or in-person.

Weekends kinda have much lower turnout than weekdays in the US ... which is funny, because here in most of Europe, elections are held on Sunday.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…