Data Visualization: Number of Early or Mail-in Votes versus Number of Registered Voters by State
As the 2024 Presidential Election ends today, November 5, I compared the number of early voters in this election to the number of registered voters in each state. This is a comparison story, but instead of me comparing two sections of one data set, I am comparing two different data sets. The data is from up to today at 8:00am eastern time with data from 46 states.
Mississippi and Alabama do not allow early voting. There was no data on early voting numbers for those two states and Kentucky, Missouri, and District of Columbia. New Hampshire also does not allow early voting, but eligible people can request an absentee ballot, so this is included in the data. The data on early voting came from Statista and registered voters came from World Population Review.
Table 1: Percentage of Early Votes to Registered Voters in 2024 Election by State
Made by Alex Lott in Excel
Because New Hampshire only allows absentee voting in certain situations, it has the lowest percentage of early votes with 8.9%. The second lowest percentage of early voters to registered voters is New Jersey with 14.55%. Joe Biden won the state in 2020 with 57.3% of the vote, which is intriguing since Democrats are the majority of people voting early. Other states with low early voting include Alaska with 26.36%, Oklahoma with 20.84%, and Utah with 24.22%. All three of these states voted for Trump in 2020 and are likely to go to him in this election cycle.
The highest percentages of people voting early were mostly in swing states - Georgia with 76.79%, Nevada with 74.65%, and North Carolina with 86.29%, the highest percentage across all the states. Other states with large percentages of early voting include Florida with 78.03%, the second highest percentage, Texas with 66.97%, and Colorado with 66.72%. Both Texas and Florida have large populations, the former with the second and the latter with the third largest populations by state, which makes it interesting that they have some of the highest early voting numbers. Both also went to Trump in the 2020 election, Florida with 51.2% and Texas with 52.1%. Colorado is ranked 21st in population, which is also intriguing, but not as much as Florida and Texas. Biden won Colorado with 55.4% of the vote. The only other state to reach the 60 percent threshold was Montana with 61.64%, but they are 43rd in population, so there are less people to compare.
One problem with the data is that the data about the amount of registered voters was rounded to the nearest thousand while the early voting data had the exact number. This means that the percentages are slightly off, but not by a lot.
