The last day for early voting in eight states, including three 2024 battlegrounds, is on Friday, with just four days to go before the Nov. 5 election.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 36 million people had voted early in person, and more than 31 million had returned mail-in ballots, the data show.
In the two dozen or so states that report party affiliation, 13 million registered Democrats have cast early in-person or mail ballots, compared with about 12.1 million registered Republicans who have done the same. Meanwhile, some 8.5 million unaffiliated Americans have voted early, according to the website.
Broken down by percentage, about 38.6 of early votes were cast by registered Democrats, 36 percent were from registered Republicans, and the remaining 25.4 percent were unaffiliated voters, the data show.
Voters have until the end of the business day to apply for an early mail-in ballot in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, located near Philadelphia.
Those in Bucks County, a bellwether whose residents Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have courted in the presidential race’s final days, have until 5 p.m. on Friday to apply for, receive, and cast on the spot a mail-in ballot.
The court-ordered deadline is a three-day extension, stemming from a lawsuit brought by Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee, and GOP Senate candidate David McCormick’s campaign this week.
In Pennsylvania’s Erie County, where more than 40,000 people requested early mail ballots, Democrats raised concerns in a lawsuit on Wednesday that thousands of voters were still waiting for them. The suit also alleged that some 1,800 ballots were lost due to postal problems and that about 300 people received two ballots, some of them for the wrong races.
To address the problems, the county has agreed to extend voter registration hours and help voters file provisional ballots at the polls on Tuesday.
“We just want to make sure that we don’t have a continuation of the problem by overloading the system with provisional ballots,” said Clifford Levine, counsel for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “I think everybody wants everybody’s vote to count.”