Early Voting Surges in US Midterms as More Than 43 Million Ballots Already Cast

With less than a week to go until the US midterm elections, which will determine which party controls Congress for the next two years, more than 43 million Americans have already voted.

Data from the University of Florida Election Lab indicates that four to five million early votes are being cast each day, a much higher rate than in most previous elections. Overall turnout appears on track to outpace 2020, or even 2018, which beat the 1914 record for overall turnout in a midterm election.

Texas has seen the highest above-average turnout rate so far, says Professor Mike McDonald, who runs the Election Lab database. Hispanic communities are also seeing a much higher turnout than usual.

Texas has already surpassed its 2022 numbers by around 1.75 million voters. More than 5.8 million ballots have already been cast in the Lone Star state, which has emerged as a key battleground that could decide which party controls the Senate for the rest of Donald Trump's presidency.

Figures released on Thursday show that 44 percent of early ballots have been cast by Democrats and 31.2 percent by Republicans, with a further 24.7 percent attributed to voters with no party affiliation. That covers only the roughly half of states that require voters to register a political affiliation.

Data from those states indicates an increase in votes cast by Democrats, while Republican early voting numbers remain generally similar to 2022. Early voting is also up among voters who chose not to register with a specific party, though the data does not show which candidates they chose.

Only three states — North Carolina, Georgia and Florida — require voters to submit their race when they register. Data from these states shows an increase in votes cast by Hispanic and Black communities, while voting among white people is on par with 2022 early voting figures.

McDonald says that makes sense because communities of colour are more frequently part of the Democratic coalition, while white voters are more frequently part of the Republican coalition.

Texas does not require voters to provide party affiliation or race. But the data still shows a surge in voting in some counties on the border with Mexico, which are more than 90 percent Hispanic. McDonald says some of them are going to beat their 2022 turnout in just the early vote alone.

Early voting has boomed in recent years, driven by the Covid pandemic, when more states began offering early voting options, both in person and by mail. In the 2020 election, more than two-thirds of all ballots were cast early, and half of those early votes were cast by mail.

Voters increasingly prefer to vote in person, even when voting early, McDonald says. They are also returning their ballots earlier than in previous elections. He believes this could be due to concerns about postal voting, though there is no data indicating the cause. Postal votes are more likely to be disqualified due to errors, he notes, and some voters could be concerned about meddling in the US Postal Service.

Some officials have already confirmed records being broken. On Thursday, the city of Minneapolis said it has set an early voting record for a non-presidential election. Early voting will soon taper off, as states start cutting off the option in the days before the election on Tuesday, November 3.