More than 78 million voters cast an early ballot — either by mail or in person — in a weekslong early voting season that was defined by a relatively seamless process.
There were sporadic mishaps — Colorado exposed partial passwords to its election machines on a state website, and a Pennsylvania county was initially short nearly 20,000 mail ballots, for example — but there was also swift relief. The Colorado breach did not put the security of the system at risk, and Erie County, Pa., extended early voting for multiple days and will have additional ballots on hand on Election Day.
Nonetheless, Americans are voting with a determination that is likely to make overall turnout in the election one of the highest in recent history (though short of the modern turnout record set in 2020). In the early vote period alone, more than one-third of all eligible voters have cast a ballot. In nine states, turnout is already past 50 percent of eligible voters.
Yet the largely smooth early voting period has been awash in disinformation, with both foreign and domestic actors seeking to sow doubt about the electoral process as it heads into the final stretch. Russian-linked disinformation was uncovered in Georgia, and former President Donald J. Trump spent nearly an hour of his rally on Sunday spreading false claims about the election and falsely asserting that Democrats “cheat.”
Litigation over the rules and mechanics of the election, which reached never-before-seen levels in the weeks and months before Election Day, continued in the final hours. On Monday alone, the Republican National Committee filed lawsuits in Georgia and Milwaukee. Dozens of lawsuits across the country remain open and are unlikely to be decided before the election.
But even the continuous litigation and disinformation did little to dissuade voters from casting a ballot.
Powering that early vote turnout has been a wide embrace of in-person early voting. While voters flocked to mail voting in the 2020 election, largely as a safe method of casting a ballot amid a deadly pandemic, early in-person voting has quickly become the preferred method, with about seven million more in-person early votes than mail ballots across the country, as of Monday afternoon.
The flood of early voting does little to offer a clear picture of who is likely to win the election; despite arming campaigns with a clearer picture of who has already voted, the massive shift of voter behavior toward early voting has made projections based on historical voting patterns incredibly difficult.
In some states, the shift toward early voting will help results come in more quickly once the polls close. But some states, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, do not allow election officials to count mail ballots before Election Day, creating a lengthy backlog of legally cast ballots to be counted. These states could be one reason a race call in the presidential contest is unlikely to come on Tuesday night.
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