The Official Absentee & Early Voting Reports Thread

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Is there a party breakdown for the requests? or just the mailed-in ballots at the tail end of the process?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I read that Romney's early vote/Absentee strategy is to get his leaners and swing voters out and then save the firmer parts of his base for election day GOTV, while Obama is doing just the opposite. 

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Early voting has begun in Indiana.

I was planning on heading over to the courthouse later today to cast my vote, but am still unsure on the Senate race.

My advice is wait to the end of the early vote period, rather than go immediately. After what happened in 2008 with Dole and her "godless" ad, you can't really react to it if you have already voted. We will probably wait towards the end of the early vote period here in NC, for that, but also because of fact that we have to wait to for my dad's registration to go through. He has never voted before, that I know of.

As for the Senate race, my suggestion would be to establish a list of strategic aims or desires that you want to achieve vis a vis the Senate and then pick the choice that best alligns with those parameters.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Your "party" in Ohio is just a record of the last primary election you voted in. In 2008, 2.4 million Ohioans voted in the Dem primary, 0.5 million in the GOP primary. This year, it was 1.1 million in the Dem primary and 1.2 million in the GOP primary. So you can't really draw any concrete conclusions through a comparison of 2012 and 2008, at least by looking at the party "registration" of the voters. Michael McDonald, a (as far as I know) non-partisan George Mason professor who's sort of an expert on early voting, wrote the following about the state last Friday:

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Advantage Romney!

But not so fast, let's look a the actual numbers that Cuyahoga so helpfully posts online.

As of Thursday's report, there are 124,967 Cuyahoga registered voters who most recently participated in a Republican primary, or 13 percent of all registered voters. There are 17,133 such persons who have voted, or 21 percent of all voters. So far the story is mostly true; perhaps it is based on an earlier Cuyahoga report.

But what about the voters who last participated in a Democratic primary? They are 343,392 of all registered voters, or 37 percent. 49,720 of these folks have voted, or 60 percent. Comparably, a larger percentage of "Democrats" have voted early in Cuyahoga than Republicans, compared to their base registration statistics.

Advantage Obama!

Before we draw that conclusion, let's understand what is really going on here. 2.4 million Ohioans voted in the 2008 Democratic primary, compared to 0.5 million in the Republican primary. Over the course of four years, some of these people were purged from the voter rolls. In 2012, 1.1 million Ohioans voted in the Democratic primary, and 1.2 million voted in the Republican primary. I suspect that there were a good number of Democrats who crossed over and voted in the Republican primary just because it was the more interesting race from the presidential perspective. In Ohio, all of these folks are now labeled Republicans. "Party" is so hopelessly confounded in Ohio that it is next to meaningless to divine who is ahead.

The Cuyahoga numbers do reveal something about early voters. They are highly participatory people who tend to vote in primaries. There are 458,193, or 49 percent, Cuyahoga registered voters who have no record of voting in any primary. Only 15,835 have voted so far, or 19 percent. Let me put this another way, people who vote the earliest are people who just generally vote.

I thus take the same conclusion from the CNN story:

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Just because Romney has a better ground game than McCain, that does not mean that Obama has not stepped up efforts, too. The Cuyahoga numbers show evidence that Obama's campaign is at least keeping pace with Republicans, if not outpacing them.

Looking across the Ohio counties, it appears that early voting is up everywhere across the state. Both campaigns are hard at work through the extended early voting period. Ohio is ground zero for this election, but we already knew that.

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Makes you wonder why Kasich and Husted and the boys didn't switch over to a traditional registration system. Since they are willing to do such other activities to help their guy win.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

My clan of four voted yesterday. Two of them were not voters back in 2008.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I think that is Iowa.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I think he is comparing it to the previous day.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

In the past, Washoe determined the winner of Nevada. However it is possible, that Washoe could go say Romney by 4 or 5 and still have Obama win Nevada based on Clark alone. Nevada is a state that is rapidly changing.

It does bode better for Heller though, since he probably will outrun Romney a greater then his statewide outrunning, in Washoe.