North Carolina: What’s Happening with Early Voting?

• MIT and Stanford researchers take a deep dive into North Carolina’s early voting data (updated daily) to understand the trends in requests, returns, demographics, and party breakdown.
• As of November 2, roughly 3.6 million North Carolina voters had already cast their ballots early in person — this number is more than three-quarters the total voter turnout from the 2016 General Election.
• On the weekend before election day alone, 158,810 North Carolinians voted.
• The rates of early voting by race have been roughly equal to their proportions of registered voters.
• Across party lines, voters with “no party affiliation” are voting early roughly neck-and-neck with registered Democrats and Republicans; the party breakdown of early voters clocks in at roughly one-third Democratic, one-third Republican, and one-third voters with no party affiliation.

With the election a few days away, researchers from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project analyzed the early voting trends across the State of North Carolina, a heated battleground for candidates.

As of this past week, roughly 3.6 million North Carolina voters had already cast their ballots early in person — this number is more than three-quarters the total voter turnout from the 2016 General Election. Early voting turnout numbers peaked in the beginning of the early voting period and have gradually declined leading up to the election.