It’s that time you’ve been waiting for, so here’s what you want:
Year Mail Early Total
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2015 14,240 8,891 23,131
2019 5,407 7,973 13,380
2023 3,289 12,740 16,029
The final EV totals from 2015 are here and the final EV totals from 2019 are here. The daily EV report is being posted online now here, but as you can see by the generic URL that will have the latest file. I’m still grabbing a copy each day and saving it for my purposes, and you can see the file for Monday here.
The obvious point of interest here is the decline in the number of mail ballots. The decline from 2015 to 2019 makes sense to me, given the anti-HERO vote as a driver of turnout in 2015. There were also more ballots mailed out in each of those years – 40K as of the first day of early voting in 2015, 20K as of the same date in 2019, and 16K in 2023. The rate of return of mail ballots is lower in 2023 than in the other years – about 35% in 2015, 25% in 2019, 20% this year. There’s time for that to go up, and mail ballots are still being sent out, but this is worth keeping in mind.
On the other hand, the number of in person voters is much higher this year than it was on Day One of either of those other years. The flow of mail ballots returned tends to be slower than the daily march of in person voters, so the difference in total turnout can narrow quickly. Again, I’m not sure what the driver of these differences are, but there’s nothing to suggest at this time that we’re headed for an unexpected level of turnout. It’s still my contention that hitting 300K, which will not require an especially high percentage of registered voters to participate, is well within range. Ask me again in a few days, but for now I think we’re on track. We may just get there via a slightly different route than what I had anticipated.
UPDATE: Day Two numbers are here, with another strong day for in person voting. The gap with 2015 is down to about 4K because of the volume of in person voters.