With one week still remaining until Election Day, Americans have already cast a record-breaking 66 million early ballots, putting the 2020 election on track for historic levels of voter turnout. That's some 19 million more pre-election votes than were cast in the 2016 election, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida professor Michael McDonald. "It's good news, because we were very much concerned about how it would be possible to conduct an election during a pandemic," he said, citing concerns that mail-in ballots would be returned by voters en masse at the conclusion of the early voting period, overwhelming election officials. "Instead, what appears to be happening is people are voting earlier and spreading out the workload for election officials."
:D It's going so smoothly, it's almost like this is how it should be every election, and not just this year due to a pandemic forcing a certain party to relent on allowing more early voting and mail in ballots....
In 2019, McDonald predicted that 150 million people would vote in 2020's general election, which would be a turnout rate of about 65% the highest since 1908. But he's going back to the drawing board. "I have increasingly been confident that 150 [million] is probably a lowball estimate," he said Monday. "I think by the end of the week I'll be upping that forecast."
In Texas, for example, 7.8 million early votes had been cast as of Tuesday morning, marking 87% of the state's total votes in 2016. Montana, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia have also reached 67% or more of their 2016 vote totals.
A surge in youth voters People ages 18 to 29 are turning out to vote early in a big way. According to data from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, a research center at Tufts University, the numbers of young people voting early have skyrocketed, particularly in states that will be critical for Biden and Trump to win, such as Michigan, Florida and North Carolina. As of Oct. 21, 257,720 young voters in Florida had voted, according to CIRCLE. That's nearly 214,000 more than had voted at that time in 2016. In Texas, almost 500,000 18- to 29-year-olds had cast their ballots by Oct. 21. However, there isn't data from 2016 with which to compare youth turnout. Young people could wield significant political power: Millennials and some members of Generation Zmake up 37% of eligible voters, roughly the same share of the electorate that baby boomers and older voters ("pre-boomers") make up, according to census data analyzed by the Brookings Institution. For decades, youth voters have showed up to the polls at relatively low rates, a statistic voter education groups have been working to change this year.