34 Million Ballots Already Cast — Early Voting Running Even With 2018’s Record Midterm

Call me a dinosaur, but Election Day should mean Election Day – not a monthlong voting marathon. Stretch the process across weeks, too much time, too many opportunities for skulduggery and chicanery. One need only look at elections here and abroad to see how many ways the results can be manipulated. In my view, election manipulation has become the preferred instrument of power seizure: the bloodless coup. No tanks in the streets. Just the machinery of democracy turned against the people it is supposed to serve.

Six days out, the turnout story is hard numbers, not models — and the pace is matching the highest-turnout midterm in a century. States Newsroom: As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 34 million people have either gone to the polls to cast a ballot or have mailed in their vote, and the current tally is on track to surpass early voting in the 2022 midterm elections, said Michael McDonald, a professor of political science at University of Florida who runs the UF Election Lab that tracks early voting. With one week until Election Day on Nov. 3, McDonald said he’s not sure if voters will surpass record-breaking early voting of 2018, but it’s clear that the surge in early voting will eclipse turnout in the 2022 midterm elections, where nearly 46 million Americans voted early, according to the UF Election Lab. “Right now, the data that I can see, it looks like we’re running at least even to the 2018 election. If the voting continues through Election Day, we would be somewhere around that number,” he said. (States Newsroom). In the 27 states that record party registration, covering roughly 16 million of those early voters, Democrats account for 45%, Republicans about 31%, and unaffiliated voters 24%. Texas has already cast more than 5 million ballots, Michigan more than 1.3 million, and Ohio nearly 1.2 million. The open question for Tuesday: whether the Republican Election Day vote, which the early numbers do not capture, closes the gap.