Locals line up to enter a polling station on the first day of early in-person voting in an area still badly affected by the storm, in Asheville, North Carolina, U.S., October 17, 2024.
Jonathan Drake | Reuters
More than 46 million Americans have cast ballots in the 2024 election as of Tuesday morning, according to NBC Newstracker, representing over a quarter of the expected electorate.
Both candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, have encouraged voters to go to the polls as soon as possible.
A week before the Nov. 5 election, early voting is underway in all seven battleground states, along with dozens more. Reports of hours-long queues outside polling stations have already surfaced on social media as voters throng the limited number of municipal venues set up to host early voting.
While millions of Americans have lined up to vote in person, another 20 million have mailed in their ballots. According to her University of Florida Election Lab.
Certain states, such as his key presidential battlegrounds North Carolina and Agriculturereported that their early voter turnout is setting a record this election cycle.
In North Carolina, 353,166 ballots were accepted on the first day of early voting on Oct. 17, surpassing the 2020 first-day record, according to preliminary data from the State Board of Elections. As of Tuesday, more than 2.7 million votes had been cast across the state, according to NBC News.
Voters cast their ballots during the first day of early voting at a polling place in Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S., Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. While no Democratic presidential candidate has won North Carolina since 2008, the campaign Harris sees the state’s 16 electoral votes as within reach after US President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
Alison Joyce | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Georgia also broke the first-day early voting record with about 310,000 ballots cast on October 15. As of Tuesday, just under 3 million ballots had been cast.
These historic voter numbers are testing the limits of America’s early voting infrastructure, which operates with only a fraction of the workers and polling stations that will be open on Election Day.
Early voting aims to give Americans more convenient alternatives to vote on Election Day. In some states, early voting also allows election officials to begin processing or counting ballots to help spread the workload of counting votes over several days.
Election and voting laws are made by individual states, not the federal government. This creates a patchwork of election operations across the country, each governed by its own rules.
People stand in line at the Metropolitan Library to vote in the US presidential election on October 15, 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia. Early voting runs from October 15th to November 1st, election day is November 5th.
Megan Varner | Getty Images
Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, for example, are allowed to begin counting their ballots before November 5. But in Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, counting may not begin until Election Day.
Early voting made up about two-thirds of the ballots cast in the 2020 election, according to Associated Press.
This massive total, more than 100 million votes, came in large part from the unique effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on American political life.
And while early voting data can provide useful indications of initial patterns within the electorate and voter enthusiasm, they are not a predictive measure of Election Day outcomes.