2020 Absentee/Early Voting thread

[Holmes]

What's interesting is there seems to be more of an urban/suburban vs rural breakdown as to the counties with the highest %, rather than Democrat vs Republican.

Wasn't this also the case in the Supreme Court race this spring?

[Holmes]

Here are two maps I've made of the mail vote requests in North Carolina through yesterday:

Partisan breakdown of requests by county:


Requests as a % of total turnout in 2016:

How is the bottom map supposed to be read?

The darker the shade, the closer that county is to reaching the amount of votes it cast in 2016 in ballot requests.

[Holmes]

One state where I will monitor early votes and probably the only one is Florida. They have a history of mass early and mail votes and Republicans do vote by mail in solid numbers.

Nevada and Arizona are also worth paying attention to since their early/mail vote is usually a very large percentage of the total turnout.

[Holmes]

Yeah, the secrecy envelope is a thing in California too and also it's a no brainer. These states that are just beginning VBM this year have a lot of.... special people.

[Holmes]

Seems like the early vote numbers aren't increasing all that much lately.  When are large amounts of ballots/early votes expected to come in? 

What were your expectations? If Virginia is giving voters 6 whole weeks to vote along with voting by mail, then I doubt everyone would be rushing right away to vote. It'll be a gradual process.

[Holmes]

Is there a discrepancy in how fast returned ballots are processed in urban/suburban counties vs rural counties? I’m noticing rural counties are lagging compared to the rest, which we did see in the spring, but some rural counties much more than others. I wonder if it’s because they’re slower to process in those counties? Some rural counties in northern WI especially have really low return rates atm.

[Holmes]

Love to break the law by lying to election officials and then post about it online.

[Holmes]

welp that didn't take long, Virginia has already surpassed NC for the most early votes at 261,000.  LOL, people in Virginia really really despise Trump.

Do we have any idea the party breakdown of these voters and regions?

This is a good site for early/mail vote in Virginia:

https://www.vpap.org/elections/early-voting/

It seems the more Democratic areas of the state have higher early voter turnout than the Republocan areas, which is expected.

[Holmes]

The polls are gonna be very lonely on Election Day in Falls Church.

[Holmes]

Still too early, but these 200k first FL votes look great for Democrats.

Half of Atlas will ignore the first three words of your post.
The other half will only look at those three words.

It took one post.

[Holmes]

I’m interested to see how early voting goes in Florida. Usually mail voting in Florida favors Republicans and early voting favors Democrats, but with Dems so far dominating mail voting, I want to see how that will affect early voting.

[Holmes]

I don't think it's worth paying much attention to early voting until right before election night. We still don't have enough data at all.

With some states already approaching 25% of their 2016 turnout more than a month still out, I disagree.

[Holmes]

I don't think it's worth paying much attention to early voting until right before election night. We still don't have enough data at all.

With some states already approaching 25% of their 2016 turnout more than a month still out, I disagree.

You're citing statistics that mean absolutely nothing of predictive value. Let's see what turnout is right before the election.

Feels like you’re dismissing me just for the sake of it. No one knows what turnout will be on Election Day itself but turnout right now I’m states with mail and early voting is huge, and there are no signs of it slowing down. Turnout is especially high in counties that are Democratic strongholds. I’m just saying that these are banked votes a whole 33 days before the election and more states will be starting early voting in the coming weeks.

[Holmes]

Miami-Dade, Orange and Pinellas have really low return rates. They must be slow at processing their ballots.

[Holmes]

Targetsmart is garbage, mama.

[Holmes]

Democrats surpass 200k lead by party ID in Florida.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17YKazYaUMZ33vmd4YHDKcVdlTkP5DmnHQQlAttwOzL0/edit#gid=1837208868

Even given Dems propensity with mail in this time around, this seems significant, since historically, Dems take their time to return them in FL don't they?

Yes, Dems are usually stronger with early voting in Florida. We'll see how things fall into place when early voting begins on the 19th.

[Holmes]

Milwaukee county catching up to WOW is making me feel good.

[Holmes]

Miami-Dade sure is taking its sweet time.

[Holmes]

Miami-Dade sure is taking its sweet time.

Yes, what's up with that?  And still want to know what's up with Philly and Montgomery PA?

For Miami-Dade, my guess would be that ballots were mailed out much later than the rest of the state, which is annoying.

[Holmes]

Michael McDonald
@ElectProject
·
4m
#earlyvote cast as a percentage of *total* 2016 vote is truly amazing

SD: 22.8%
VA 20.7%
WI: 20.6%
WY: 14.9%
VT: 14% (report from yesterday)
MI: 13.1% (report from yesterday)
ND: 12.1%
NJ: 12.3%
FL: 12.3%
MN: 11.3% (report from last Fri.)

https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-202

LOL regarding the ridiculous Virginia turnout, that's just pure hatred of Trump fueling it.

Wisconsin too.

[Holmes]

Minnesota came in strong. Hennepin and Ramsey are looking strong at nearly 50% returned each.

[Holmes]

PA numbers picking up, but still very low compared to other states.  But the partisan gap is enormous.

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

198k D
42k R

Allegheny is posting big numbers at 35% returned. Philly and the burbs (other than Chester) and Lackawanna have basically nothing returned yet.

[Holmes]

AA vote in GA dropped 1% to 33% keeping an eye out if it will fall below 30... it's been dropping slowly with each day of new data.

Wait for the early voting before really making any predictions. Same with North Carolina.

[Holmes]

Do we know if all these votes in PA are valid, or do the ones not in the slips get invalidated on Election Day when they’re opened up and counted?

Does anyone have an answer for this

Michael McDonald’s site doesn’t specify and he cites his source as the Pennsylvania SoS. I’m looking at the SoS’s site now but I’m not really finding anything. You might want to tweet McDonald and ask him directly.

[Holmes]

The USPS stuff might have backfired on Trump. It looks like it scared a lot of Democrats into sending their ballots in as early as possible.

Could these be Democratic supervoters voting early?
Is there anybody left who will vote on Election Day?

Of course there will be people left to vote on election day. Dems got 65 million votes the last two elections, so unless 65 million+ Dems mail their ballot or vote early, they will show up on Election Day.