‘Some of these votes are cast by military and overseas civilians,’ a professor wrote.
More than 300 people have cast their votes early in the 2024 general election, with just about a month and a half to go before Election Day, Nov. 5, according to the University of Florida’s tracking tool.
The UF Election Lab’s early voting tracker showed that, as of Thursday, 317 people had cast ballots in five states: Wisconsin, Iowa, Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Around 120 people have voted in each of the swing states: Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; 15 people have voted in Georgia, seven voted in Iowa, and more than 50 voted in Florida.
“I can see from individual records that some of these votes are cast by military and overseas civilians using a Federal Write-In Absentee ballot, as allowed under federal law,” Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who oversees the school’s project and specializes in U.S. elections, wrote in a post on X. “I know some of these states haven’t sent ballots to domestic civilian voters yet.”
Not every state reports voters by party affiliation. Of those that do, 174 people have voted, with 93 Democrats, 63 Republicans, and 18 unaffiliated or minor party voters having cast ballots, the data show.
Even fewer states report gender data, but the tracker shows that women have overwhelmingly cast early ballots so far. About 73.3 percent of early ballots were cast by women, with 20 percent cast by men, and 6.7 percent marked “unknown.”
Broken down by age, 35 percent of early voters were aged 41–65, about 23 percent were over 65, 40 percent were 26–40, and 19 percent were in the 18–25 age range, according to the tracking site.
“As of now, states are only reporting mail ballot request statistics. In some states, these statistics are drawn from ballot request data files, and in others—such as the all-mail ballot states—they are implied by the most recent counts of active registered voters,” the UF Tracker site noted.
Meanwhile, about 41.4 million ballots have been requested in states that report mail-in ballots ahead of the Nov. 4 election, the tracking site shows.
In the 2020 federal election, more than 101 million people voted by mail or cast early in-person votes, according to the UF tracking tool for that election. Some 65 million people returned mail ballots, while more than 35 million voted early in person.
Democrats favored mail-in ballots and early in-person voting in 2020, with 44.8 percent opting to cast their ballots that way. About 30 percent of early in-person or mail-in ballots were cast by Republicans, 24 percent were not affiliated with any party, and 0.7 percent were affiliated with a minor party, it shows.
Voting by mail was pushed by a number of state officials across the United States ahead of the previous federal election, in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. Some states, including Pennsylvania, also opted to change their voting laws to expand the process.
Some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have said that mail-in balloting can be exploited by fraudsters. Election officials in several Democrat-aligned states said in 2020, however, that there was no fraud that swung the election in the former president’s favor.
Last week, the first general election ballots for the 2024 presidential race went out, with Alabama the first state to do so. County officials began the process mailing out absentee ballots on Sept. 11, or 55 days before the Nov. 5 date, according to state law.
North Carolina would have been the first state to mail out its ballots this year, but a court ruling delayed the process. A judge in September ruled that it must reprint ballots before mailing them out to voters after a challenge from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, to remove his name from the ballot after he suspended his campaign last month.