Early voting

A big very recent change in American national elections is the move to early voting. Michael McDonald’s University of Florida Election Lab has a bunch of interesting stats, which I’m quoting here.

By early voting I mean any form of voting other than casting an in-person ballot on election day. (Note that in some of the eight states that now offer automatic voting by mail you can mail your vote via the USPS on Election Day itself, while in states like Colorado you can still cast a mail-in vote on Election Day itself if you take it to a ballot box dropoff NOT THE US MAIL. In any event all mail-in votes are being categorized here as early voting).

Until 1996 less than ten percent of votes cast in presidential elections were via early voting. This percentage climbed rapidly, as states began to provide in-person early voting options, no excuse absentee ballots, and automatic all-mail elections. As of now all but three states provide some form of no-excuse early voting. 20% of the vote was early in 2004. This rose to 30%, 32%, and 39% in the next three presidential elections

2020 was of course the pandemic year, which enormously accelerated this trend. Lots of states that hadn’t provided early voting options before — I remember how aggravated I was by the bureaucratic maze my 85-year-old mother had to negotiate to vote early in Michigan in 2016 — now did so, plus lots of people didn’t want to get Covid while voting, so the early vote skyrocketed to 69%. This declined sharply in 2022 to 47%, but this was still quite a bit higher than the pre-pandemic baseline, plus early voting percentages are always lower in non-presidential national election years.

The other complicating factor here in regard to predicting the percentage of early voting in this election is Donald Trump’s moronic self-sabotaging decision to oppose early voting — a decision which in his inimitable way he has still not completely reversed even now: he was still blasting early voting as inherently corrupt in Michigan two days ago! Trump is just an extremely stupid person, which is something that everybody tends to forget because it’s pretty disturbing to consider. (The classic dictum is from lifelong New Yorker/Trump observer Fran Leibowitz: “You don’t know anybody as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”).

Because Trump is such an idiot, the fact that he made up some asinine fact-free narrative about how voter fraud cost him the 2020 election led him to fixate on the notion that early voting is inherently fraudulent, since there was so much of it in 2020. (There is literally no evidence that early voting is more prone to fraud than traditional voting). Despite various efforts by his handlers to get him to stop telling people to not vote early, these efforts have been only partially successful, hence his comments in Michigan earlier this week.

Anyway, per the UF Election Tracker there had been 48.7 million early votes recorded as cast as of a couple of hours ago. For the past week the daily rate has averaged just over four million a day, but several states, including some big ones such as New York just started early in person voting this weekend (what the hell is wrong with New York state politics anyway, yeah Jeets), so that average will probably be higher over the remaining seven days of early voting. You can do the math and extrapolate, but my guess is that ultimately something like 55% of this year’s vote will be early, so let’s see here . . . if we assume five million votes per day over the next seven days, we’re looking at 83 million early votes, and if that’s 55% of the total we have . . . 151 million total votes, which would be about 4% lower than in 2020. But obviously there’s a lot of guesswork in all those numbers at this point.

Whatever the final numbers may be, the transition from in person Election Day voting to other forms of voting has been rapid, pervasive, and no doubt practically significant in all sorts of ways. It was an absolute scandal that until so recently so many Americans faced so many real barriers to actually voting — having to spend what was often literally hours to do so on what for most people is a mandatory work day being the most obvious — and it’s good that this particular dysfunction of our electoral system is being ameliorated, despite Trump’s ongoing pernicious nonsense about how early voting is inherently fraudulent. (All of which is just a prelude to his refusal to accept the results if he loses).