4 charts show how early voting is going in the US

By CNN Newsource

Published October 23, 2024 2:00 AM

By Curt Merrill, Matt Stiles, Ethan Cohen and John Murphy-Teixidor, CNN

CNN is monitoring who is casting pre-election ballots in the 36 states that offer early voting, as well as how early voting numbers compare with four years ago, when pre-election voting reached historic levels during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This page, updated daily, draws on data from Catalist, election officials and Edison Research.

Democrats held a wide advantage over Republicans in early voting four years ago, but the gap could be narrower this time as top Republican officials urge supporters to embrace voting before Election Day on November 5.

Voters register by party in four of the seven president battlegrounds and in each of those four, Democrats have cast a smaller share of pre-election ballots this year than at this point in 2020. Registration data by party is not available for the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin.

The overall downtick in interest in early voting so far shouldn’t be surprising.

The 2020 election featured historic levels of pre-election voting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some voters were wary to vote in-person with guidelines from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention recommending social distancing. Four years later, with the country out of the pandemic, more voters could be heading back to the ballot box for in-person voting either before or on Election Day.

Another measure evident in the data so far is that older voters have made up a larger share of people casting ballots in battleground states, compared with this point in 2020.

The data also show early voting trends by racial and ethnic groups, offering clues about the makeup of the electorate. In some battleground states, a greater share of White voters have cast pre-election ballots than at this point in 2020.

CNN’s Molly English contributed to this report.