I’ll jump right in. Here are your Day One early voting totals. The table for comparison:
Election Mail Early Total
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2018 D 4,174 3,883 8,007
2018 R 6,138 3,509 9,647
2020 D 11,571 6,819 18,390
2020 R 12,890 5,411 18,301
2022 D 2,621 4,585 7,206
2022 R 1,432 5,233 6,665
2018 final totals are here, and 2020 final totals are here. I may go find some other years’ totals for grins if I have the time. I note that day one this year is lower than day one of 2018, which surprises me a bit. That said, it’s clearly due to the smaller number of mail ballots returned, so let’s not jump to conclusions. As discussed before, we just don’t know yet how many people will simply transition to voting in person, and how many will end up not voting as a result of our stupid and destructive new law. We will just have to see.
The one other piece of data we have right now is that there were 39,366 mail ballots total sent out as of Monday. That’s up from 27,000 from late last week, but way down from the nearly 70K in 2020 and 64K in 2018. For no reason I can think of, the daily totals do not break down the mail ballots sent out by party, so all I know is that sum total. I will try to inquire about that, as it’s an important fact to have.
I will try to report on this most days – the numbers come in close to 9 PM, which isn’t very amenable to my extreme early bird schedule, but I’ll do what I can. Note that next Monday is Presidents Day and there is no voting that day. We’ll get through this and try to figure out these mysteries together.