Early Voting Passes 43 Million Nationwide and 6.2 Million in Texas Heading Into the Final Day
One day of early voting remains, and the count has already passed all of 2022 in Texas. The University of Florida's Election Lab puts the national early vote above 43 million - with its own warning attached: the early count cannot predict the result.
HOUSTON - More than 43 million Americans had already voted early as of Thursday, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab - a count that climbed from about 23 million on October 24 in five days, at a pace lab director Michael McDonald put at four to five million early votes landing each day. McDonald said turnout appears on track to beat 2020 and 2018, the cycle that broke the 1914 midterm record. Texas is leading the surge in raw ballots.
The Texas totals depend on which tracker and which snapshot, and they are close. On Point Politics, compiling state election-office counts as of October 29, put 6,213,508 ballots cast in Texas - 5,972,212 of them in person and 241,296 by mail - a total it notes is already 100 percent of the 5.51 million early ballots cast in all of 2022, with one full day of early voting still to run. PollingSource's compilation of Secretary of State data through October 28 stood at 6,158,701 - 5,920,327 in person and 238,374 by mail - after October 28 alone added 463,246 ballots. The Election Lab's own Texas snapshot, taken earlier, read more than 5.8 million, about 1.75 million above the state's entire 2022 early total.
What the numbers do not do is call the election. McDonald himself made the point the trackers repeat: Texas does not record party or race on voter registration, Election Day voting usually tilts Republican, and the early count cannot predict the result. The modeled partisan readings other analyses attach to the Texas early vote are estimates built on voter-file modeling, not counts of how anyone voted - no ballot cast early says anything about its contents until it is opened and tallied.
What remains is mechanical. Early voting ends Friday, October 30, at 7 p.m. in Harris County and across Texas; there is no voting Saturday, Sunday or Monday; and Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. However Friday goes, Texas will finish its early period millions of ballots past 2022 - and both campaigns will spend the weekend arguing about what, if anything, that means.
