How to avoid misreading the early voting numbers

One week out from Election Day, who is casting early votes is getting increased attention. But while early voting is a useful tool, it is easy to read too much into these patterns.

One week out from Election Day, who is casting early votes is getting increased attention. NBC News’ tracker of early ballot returns is one of several presenting information on who has already cast ballots state by state — tantalizing hard numbers after a campaign full of polling suggesting a close race but nothing more definitive than that.

But while early voting is a useful tool for understanding what has transpired to date, it is easy to read more than is appropriate into these patterns and what they mean for the 2024 election, given what we know about when different types of people are likely to vote. In particular, we know that younger people disproportionately wait until closer to Election Day to cast their early votes.

Our main takeaway: Even with weeks of early voting already complete in some places and only days left before it’s all over, it’s still dangerous to read too much into partisan breakouts of who has voted so far. There is still time for those patterns to shift — and we’ve already seen them shift in twists and turns through recent weeks of early voting.

About 10 days ago, NBC News explored some initial patterns in Virginia’s early voting, noting that as a share of total turnout from 2020, voters in parts of the state that generally support Republican candidates had cast more ballots than in parts of the state that generally support Democratic candidates.

Because we speculated that these differences might reduce once more of Virginia’s satellite voting locations opened, we thought it was premature to conclude based on these patterns that Republican-learning areas were headed toward higher turnout than Democratic-learning areas. Consistent with that hypothesis, the below table of early voting through Oct. 26 shows substantial leveling in the usage of early voting over different areas.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/avoid-misreading-early-voting-numbers-rcna177513

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