Early & Absentee Voting Megathread - Build the Freiwal

[Tender Branson]

It's very hard to read anything into this early ballot request spike in MN, because a rise in absentee ballots doesn't necessarily mean higher turnout overall.

Still, I would like to see an increase in turnout in these mid-terms, because turnout in US midterms is always very crappy.

[Tender Branson]

Has this been posted?

https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/pdf/2018/general/AbsenteeCongressional2018.pdf

In absentee numbers (sent):

Democrats: 83,734
Republicans: 20,564
No Party: 25,979
Libertarian: 756


IIRC, Democrats tend to do well in Iowa with absentee voting but I don't recall it being that big of a gap.

Iowa Rs always request and return ballots much later than Democrats and close the gap as election day approaches.

But the gap seems bigger this year, which is a sign of big D enthusiasm over the Rs.

[Tender Branson]

Massive problems reported in GA on the first day of early voting ...

It seems Kemp and his people at the SoS are doing everything possible to install him as Governor.

[Tender Branson]

Yesterday was the first day to vote early in TN, and here are the statistics.

2018: 109.472 people voted
2016: 141.654 people voted

For the 2018 primaries, 47.052 voted on the first day.

[Tender Branson]

TN early voting continues to be huge on the second day.

Not the 2016 presidential levels, but not far below ...

2nd day, 2018: 97.990
2nd day, 2016: 127.803
2nd day, 2018 (primary): 15.535

[Tender Branson]

The numbers are absolutely brutal for Republicans so far.

But it's only the early vote and election-day-voters could make it close again in some states.

[Tender Branson]

400.000 people have voted early in TN on the first 4 days so far, compared with 473.000 in the first 4 days of the 2016 Presidential general election.

The days are comparable, because both this year and in 2016, the first 4 days were between Wed. and Sat.

[Tender Branson]

If nothing else I think we can conclude this will be a high turnout election.

This posting is wrong ... and wrong in 2 ways:

A) just because there's an increase in early/absentee voting, it doesn't necessarily mean overall turnout will be higher. Early voting could also taper off, or election day turnout could be lower.

B) in the US, no election is "high turnout". Even in a Presidential election, the US does not manage to get higher than 60%. In mid-term elections, it's somewhere between 38-45%, which is horrible. Even if it ends up higher this time (45%), it's utterly horrible when compared with other countries.

[Tender Branson]

Prof. McDonald and the surge in early voting so far has been mentioned in Austrian newspapers today:

https://diepresse.com/home/ausland/aussenpolitik/5520157/Beteiligung-an-USKongresswahlen-ungewoehnlich-hoch

"Early voting turnout surprisingly high so far."

"Could hit the record of 49% from 1964."

---

All of this is relative IMO though: it is not really high in an international context: It was just abysmal in previous midterms and is now rising to an acceptable, but still low level of 45-50%.

I always take a good laugh when you Americans refer to 40-50% turnouts as "huge" ...

75-90% is "huge".

[Tender Branson]

In fact:

Because Americans are so lazy voters, it could even be debated if the GOP-controlled Congress or Trump have a real legitimacy or mandate from the US voters when elected.

Out of 240 million adult Americans, only a quarter elected Trump President (60 Mio. votes) and the GOP only got 40 million votes (or 1/6th of all American adults). 3 in 4 adult Americans did not vote for Trump in 2016 and 5 in 6 adult Americans did not vote for the GOP in 2014.

[Tender Branson]

Early voting is tapering off a bit in TN.

During the first few days, TN had about 85-90% of the 2016 early voting turnout.

This is now down to about 75% of the 2016 numbers, incl. yesterdays numbers.

But while rural counties had a huge drop in early voting yesterday, big urban counties like Davidson remained almost unchanged compared with previous days ...

[Tender Branson]

Yesterday, TN was back to 87% of 2016 early turnout, suggesting that the pace is picking up a lot again.

Last week it went down to as low as 70-75% of 2016 early turnout ...

[Tender Branson]

Another huge early voting day in TN.

Probably around 100.000 votes were cast yesterday (reports are still coming in).

On the comparable Tuesday in 2016, it was 109.000 votes.

1.5 million early votes seem possible this year, compared with 1.7 during the 2016 general election.

[Tender Branson]

Another big day in TN yesterday with ~100.000 votes.

Today will be the last day to vote early there and about 120-130.000 final votes are expected.

For ca. 1.3-1.4 million in total vs. 1.66 million in the 2016 GE.

In 2014, about 0.6 million voted early ...

[Tender Branson]

TN will likely end at 1.37 million votes vs. 1.66 million in 2016.

That is 83% of 2016 early voting and 230% of 2014 early voting.

(It should be noted that overall 2014 turnout in TN was catastrophic and even in 2016, TN ranked as 2nd to last in turnout in the US among all states, just behind HI and WV).

[Tender Branson]

TN early voting is over:

1.38 million people have voted early.

1.66 million did in 2016.

0.62 million did in 2014.

[Tender Branson]

Republicans are pretty much screwed on Tuesday.

I will likely make my final predictions tomorrow, unless there are some final polls on Monday.

But I'm more going by past Dem wave election trends, special election results and early-voting trends this time and ignore the polls, such as the R-leaning ones in TN and TX (which I think will be really close races).

[Tender Branson]

What the Story in AZ?

Dems on pace to whittle the advantage down to R+7 tomorrow which would be about the same as the 2016 EV gap

Considering Dems lost AZ in 2016... is this a worrisome early vote result for Dems?

Note that Indys broke nicely for the Rs and Trump in 2016 because of an anti-Hillary climate.

Today, Indys are breaking strongly Dem - which could overcome even a moderate R turnout advantage. See the special elections in AZ and elsewhere, where Indys broke about 2-1 for the Dems.

[Tender Branson]

Nice overview of the TN early vote:

PDF Link

Nashville + suburbs have the highest turnout and big increases in early voting numbers.

[Tender Branson]

How many states still allow people to vote early today, tomorrow and on Monday ?

[Tender Branson]

An Atlanta EV location 2.5 hours after the polls closed last night:

https://twitter.com/TIAreports/status/1058532344099942402

2 things I don't get:

* why are there lines in the first place ? There should be enough early voting precincts and voters should be assigned to their precinct, so that there's a cap of 500-1000 voters per precinct. Which would mean there are no lines.

* why are these people waiting 5, 6 or 7 hours in a line to vote early ? If they could do so in 5 minutes on election day ? Or by postal ballot ?

[Tender Branson]

An Atlanta EV location 2.5 hours after the polls closed last night:

https://twitter.com/TIAreports/status/1058532344099942402

2 things I don't get:

* why are there lines in the first place ? There should be enough early voting precincts and voters should be assigned to their precinct, so that there's a cap of 500-1000 voters per precinct. Which would mean there are no lines.

* why are these people waiting 5, 6 or 7 hours in a line to vote early ? If they could do so in 5 minutes on election day ? Or by postal ballot ?

At least in Georgia, early voting is not done at the local precinct.  My county (Forsyth) had early voting at the central elections office for the last two weeks, and at three satellite locations for last week only.  Any county voter can use any of these early locations.  This is a county with 230K people and 145K registered voters, and I think it's a bit more generous than the average county.  For Election Day, there are 16 precincts distributed across the county; on Election Day, you can only vote in your home precinct.

Stuff like this is always a recipe for disaster ...

For early voting, there should be the same precinct infrastructure in place as for election day.

Otherwise, you will always have these massive lines where people have to wait for hours and are likely to give up, go back home and not vote again. Which would be bad.

Election officials should be able to find enough (retired) poll workers to keep all the precincts open for a certain period (the week or so before election day).

[Tender Branson]

An Atlanta EV location 2.5 hours after the polls closed last night:

https://twitter.com/TIAreports/status/1058532344099942402

2 things I don't get:

* why are there lines in the first place ? There should be enough early voting precincts and voters should be assigned to their precinct, so that there's a cap of 500-1000 voters per precinct. Which would mean there are no lines.

* why are these people waiting 5, 6 or 7 hours in a line to vote early ? If they could do so in 5 minutes on election day ? Or by postal ballot ?

At least in Georgia, early voting is not done at the local precinct.  My county (Forsyth) had early voting at the central elections office for the last two weeks, and at three satellite locations for last week only.  Any county voter can use any of these early locations.  This is a county with 230K people and 145K registered voters, and I think it's a bit more generous than the average county.  For Election Day, there are 16 precincts distributed across the county; on Election Day, you can only vote in your home precinct.

Stuff like this is always a recipe for disaster ...

For early voting, there should be the same precinct infrastructure in place as for election day.

Otherwise, you will always have these massive lines where people have to wait for hours and are likely to give up, go back home and not vote again. Which would be bad.

Election officials should be able to find enough (retired) poll workers to keep all the precincts open for a certain period (the week or so before election day).

It comes down to sheer cost. For the most part, Georgia tends to have one early vote location for every 50-75k people (my county, with over 100k, only has 1 location; this is why EV lines have consistently been 30 minutes to 1 hour for the past 2 elections).

In my county, Election Day voting costs about $30,000 to host. You need dozens of paid employees (who are not on any public payroll full-time, and many would not agree to do the work for 3 weeks straight when it only pays $10/hour and they already have full-time jobs) to staff precincts for 16 days.

Suddenly, you're talking about spending a half-million dollars for each of the potentially 4 elections every year (primary, primary runoff, general, general runoff). That's $2,000,000 or more per election cycle for a county with a general government budget of like $25,000,000. It's just too cost-exorbitant.

Early voting at centralized locations, in contrast, is much, much cheaper - in large part because you can use already-existing Board of Elections employees and have them run the show out of their workplaces.

Elections are costly, yes, but that's fine. Besides, parties and candidates should have to pay a certain amount to the SoS in each state to finance proper election infrastructure, instead of harassing voters with millions of silly political ads that cost millions more.

As an Australian looking in I am horrified that people are waiting literally hours to vote. Bloody insane. I've never waited more than 15 minutes in Australia whether it's early voting on election day voting.

Yeah, as an Austrian this is also hard to accept.

I'd be shocked if people had to wait longer than 1 or 2 minutes before they are able to cast their vote.

[Tender Branson]

CO might be "all-mail" (in theory), but in 2016, there were 2.86 million total ballots cast - but only 2.22 million of them were mailed back.

640k people voted or dropped off their ballots on election day.

[Tender Branson]

CO might be "all-mail" (in theory), but in 2016, there were 2.86 million total ballots cast - but only 2.22 million of them were mailed back.

640k people voted or dropped off their ballots on election day.

Also, more than 300.000 ballots were received over the weekend in CO and the new total until noon today is 1.52 million received.

With the additional ballots coming in today and tomorrow and election day voters/dropoffs, the final number should hit 2 million or more.