2020 Absentee/Early Voting thread

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https://twitter.com/davebjerke/status/1308509644122402816

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https://twitter.com/davebjerke/status/1308875641320886272

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https://twitter.com/timelywriter/status/1309246909144539136

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https://twitter.com/timelywriter/status/1309246909144539136

Just one day? I mean I guess it's better than nothing but at least 3 days would've been better

Agreed.

Apparently this only applies to municipalities with populations at or above 25,000, which is completely arbitrary, imho. This also means we may see a counting bias in favor of larger cities and townships on election night. Just something to keep in mind.

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https://twitter.com/WinWithJMC/status/1309649589105037312

4,536 returned - 2,694 (59%) Dem; 568 (13%) Rep; 1,274 (28%) Other.

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https://twitter.com/davebjerke/status/1309597388072517634

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https://twitter.com/cheyennehaslett/status/1311733108039974912

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Michigan is now coming in at a good clip. Added 200K votes in just a day, although some counties may still be catching up from the weekend.

Wayne County is over 80K and their keeping pace with the statewide average in terms of returned ballots, which is good. The problem for the GOP is that they no longer have that many counties where they can reliably squeeze out a ton of votes. They used to have Kent County, but that's swing territory now along with Macomb.

They pretty much only have Ottawa and Livingston and have to hope they can replicate Trump's insane margins in the areas north of Mt. Pleasant and the counties that border Indiana and Ohio. Even then, the presence of Marquette, Kalamazoo, and Jackson dilute the impact of Trump's support in these places.

Keep an eye on the differential between Oakland and Wayne County; I wouldn't be surprised if the former came very close to out-voting the latter at the end of the day.

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Another huge update from Michigan:

824,525 returned (up 187,737 from yesterday)

17.2% of total 2016 turnout

https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/MI.html

Impressive. The statewide return rate is 29.9% with this update. Oakland County is lagging behind at 24.9%, but I think most of that difference is a function of township and city clerks in the county sending out absentee ballots somewhat late.

I am heartened to see Wayne County is still generally keeping pace with the rest of the state (27.3% return rate); I would be interested to see how Detroit is doing specifically but I can't find anything online and the city clerk's website is useless.

No concerns so far with what I am seeing in the other Dem strongholds. Voters in Ingham, Kalamazoo, Washtenaw, etc. all seem to be returning their ballots at a brisk pace.

Of the counties that voted for Whitmer in 2018, there is currently an average return rate of 33.5% but this I didn't the time to weight the returns so that's not going to be a useful metric; maybe I'll create a spreadsheet to track all of this and weight the returns properly over the weekend.

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https://twitter.com/NCSBE/status/1316887674301652992

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Michigan: Notable in today's update, Oakland County surpassed Wayne (Detroit) in terms of the percentage of mail-in ballots returned. I wouldn't be surprised if Oakland also surpasses Wayne in terms of raw ballots returned within the next couple of days.