Early ballots pass 43 million as US midterms approach

Texas surpasses 2022 early-vote tally by 1.75 million

More than 43 million Americans have already voted in the US midterm elections, with less than a week to go before the 3 November election that will determine which party controls Congress for the next two years. Data from the University of Florida Election Lab shows four to five million early ballots being cast each day, a much higher rate than in most previous elections.

Overall turnout appears on track to outpace 2020, or even 2018, which beat the 1914 record for overall turnout in a midterm election. Texas has seen the highest above-average turnout rate so far, according to Prof Mike McDonald, who runs the Election Lab database, and Hispanic communities are seeing much higher turnout than usual.

Texas has already surpassed its 2022 numbers by around 1.75 million voters, McDonald said, with more than 5.8 million ballots cast in the state. The Lone Star state has emerged as a key battleground that could decide which party controls the Senate for the rest of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Figures on Thursday showed 44% of early ballots cast by Democrats and 31.2% by Republicans, with a further 24.7% attributed to voters with no party affiliation. Those figures cover the roughly half of states that require voters to register a party affiliation. Data from those states indicates an increase in votes cast by Democrats, while Republican early-voting numbers remain generally similar to 2022. Early voting is also up among voters who chose not to register with a specific party, he said, although the data does not show which candidates they chose.

North Carolina, Georgia and Florida require voters to submit their race when they register, and data from those states shows an increase in votes cast by Hispanic and Black communities, while voting among white people is on par with 2022 early-voting figures. “That makes sense because communities of colour are more frequently part of the Democratic coalition, and whites are more frequently part of the Republican coalition,” McDonald said.

Texas does not require voters to provide party affiliation or race, but the data still shows a surge in voting by some counties on the border with Mexico, which are more than 90% Hispanic. “When I look at those counties, what I see is some of them are going to beat their 2022 turnout in just the early vote alone,” McDonald said.

Early voting has boomed in recent years, driven by the Covid pandemic, when more states began offering early-voting options including in-person and mail ballots. In the 2020 election, when voters were picking both the next president and their lawmakers, more than two-thirds of all ballots were cast early, and half of those early votes were cast by mail. Voters increasingly prefer to vote in person even when voting early, McDonald said, and they are returning their ballots earlier than in previous elections. He said he believes the earlier returns could be due to concerns about postal voting, but said there is no data to indicate what could be causing this.

Postal votes are more likely to be disqualified due to errors, McDonald noted, and some voters could be concerned about meddling in the US Postal Service.

Some officials have already confirmed records being broken. On Thursday, the city of Minneapolis said it has set an early-voting record for a non-presidential election. Early voting will soon taper off, as states start cutting off early voting as an option in the days before the election on Tuesday, 3 November.