More than 10 per cent of registered voters in the US had already voted by Tuesday, with election day still two weeks away.
The University of Florida's Election Lab, which tracks early polling and related issues, reported that 17,768,575 voters had cast their ballots by Tuesday.
According to the most recent data cited by other sources, there were an estimated 161 million registered voters in 2022.
Of these early votes cast up to now, 6,685,740 were in-person early votes while 10,986,247 mail ballots were returned. Many more mail ballots were cast as the number requested stood at 57,289,583.
Election day is November 3.
Early voting is turning out to be one of the defining features of US elections, getting a boost in the 2020 elections that took place amidst a raging COVID-19 outbreak.
Likely, there was less of a chance of crowded polling booths by the time Americans cast most of their votes: mainly either by mail or early vote. The New York Times reported that over 30 million had voted at this point in 2020; 65.6 million people voted by mail during the year, and another 35.8 million voted early in person.
Early voting had been very popular with Democrats, but Republicans are catching up despite mixed messaging from their presidential nominee Donald Trump, the former president, who had criticized early voting but is now urging Republicans to vote early.
By last Friday, 177,000 votes had been cast in Louisiana, which is a record for the deeply conservative/Republican state.
There was 44.8% or 4,094,729 early votes cast so far from Democrats, while Republicans accounted for 33.5 per cent—3,061,714, based on the University of Florida's Election Lab.
According to The Wall Street Journal, "it is too early to draw conclusions about the performance of the party overall," said Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida, who runs the numbers for early voting on Election Lab. The data thus far "demonstrate much more of a shift in how Republicans are casting their ballots than it does in an indication of how the party is performing.".
With Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party nominee, and former President Trump, the Republican candidate, running neck and neck in the polls, the two are touring the seven battleground states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona – to woo the remaining, dwindling undecided voters.
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