Five weeks to Election Day, pre-election voting looks set to decline from pandemic-era highs

While there are still five weeks until Election Day, voting is already underway across the country and a CNN review suggests pre-election voting this year will drop from the pandemic-era highs of 2020.

While there are still five weeks until Election Day, voting is already underway across the country and a CNN review suggests pre-election voting this year will drop from the pandemic-era highs of 2020. More than 500,000 votes have already been cast as of Tuesday in 27 states for which data was available, according to election officials, Edison Research and Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit advocacy groups, including insights into who is voting before November. That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly 158 million votes cast for president in the 2020 election. In the 35 states and the District of Columbia where data is available, more than 53 million pre-election ballots have been requested by voters so far, including in states where all voters receive a ballot in the mail. But across the board, ballot requests are down from where they were at this point four years ago, according to Catalist’s data. While early voting data is not predictive of ultimate outcomes, it can give a good picture of “general trends” across voters of different ages, genders and races in the lead-up to the election, Catalist CEO Michael Frias told CNN. The downtick in interest in early voting so far shouldn’t be surprising.