Early Voting Tops 50 Million Nationally, Past All of 2022, With Florida Among the Leaders
National trackers using University of Florida Election Lab data put early ballots at roughly 49.6 to 51.3 million by October 31 - already more than were cast before Election Day in 2022, driven by a surge in in-person voting.
The early vote is no longer a preview of the election; by raw count, it has already outgrown the last midterm's entire early vote. National trackers using University of Florida Election Lab data put early ballots at roughly 49.6 to 51.3 million by October 31, according to Particle News' summary of the trackers - exceeding the total cast before Election Day in 2022, with two days of early voting and Election Day itself still to come.
The engine is in-person voting. More than 28 million of those ballots were cast in person, a sharp rise from about 20.5 million in-person early votes in 2022, the trackers found - election offices in the biggest states have been adding sites, staff and equipment to handle demand. The largest raw totals sit where the people are: Texas at about 6.9 million, California at about 5.1 million and Florida at about 4.7 million in the national tracker's count. Florida readers will note this desk's own Florida file counted 5,153,389 Florida ballots as of the October 31 close - a later, Florida-specific tally than the national tracker's Florida figure, which is why the two numbers differ; both are reported here with their sources rather than blended into one.
The party picture comes with the trackers' own warning label. In the roughly 27 states that report party registration on early ballots, Democrats accounted for about 43 percent of early voters and Republicans about 32 percent - but those states do not represent the full country, and a voter's registration does not reveal the voter's choices. Analysts and officials alike caution that early totals say who has voted, not how.
For Miami-Dade, the national surge lands as a local deadline: Sunday is the county's final early voting day, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at 28 sites, before Election Day on Tuesday, November 3. Whatever the final national early total becomes, it will be built the same way the local one is - one more voter deciding not to wait for Tuesday.
