On October 17, 2024, in Asheville, North Carolina, the United States, local residents lined up to enter voting stations in areas still severely affected by the storm.
Jonathan Drake | Reuters
According to statistics, as of Tuesday morning, more than 46 million Americans have voted in the 2024 election nbc news” followers, accounting for more than a quarter of expected voters.
Both nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, encouraged voters to get to the ballot box as soon as possible.
With one week to go until the Nov. 5 election, early voting has begun in all seven battleground states and dozens of others. Reports of hours-long queues outside polling stations have emerged on social media as voters crowded into limited municipal spaces set up for early voting.
While millions of Americans lined up to vote in person, 20 million Americans still cast ballots by mail. According to the agency, the 46.5 million early votes cast were almost evenly split, whether cast in person or by mail. University of Florida Elections Lab.
Some states, such as key battlegrounds for the president North Carolina and Georgiareported they had record early voter turnout this election cycle.
In North Carolina, 353,166 ballots were accepted on the first day of early voting on Oct. 17, breaking 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.
Georgia also broke its first-day early voting record, with an estimated 310,000 votes cast on October 15.
These historic voter numbers are testing the limits of America’s early voting infrastructure, which is run by only a handful of staff and polling locations open on Election Day.
Voters cast their ballots on the first day of early voting at a polling station in Wilmington, North Carolina, USA, on Thursday, October 17, 2024. The team believes the state’s approval rating is strong.
Alison Joyce | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Early voting is designed to give Americans a more convenient alternative to voting on Election Day. In some states, early voting can also give election officials a head start on processing or counting ballots to help spread the counting workload over several days.
Election and voting laws are set by the states, not the federal government. This has created a patchwork of election campaigns across the country, each with its own rules.
For example, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada were given until November 5 to begin counting votes.
Early voting accounted for about two-thirds of the votes cast in the 2020 election, according to the Board of Elections. Associated Press.
This massive total (more than 100 million votes cast) was driven primarily by the unique impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of American citizens.
While early voting data can provide useful indications of initial patterns of voters and voter enthusiasm, it is not a predictor of Election Day results.
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