November 6th is 13 days away, but for more than one million Americans, Election Day was Tuesday the 23rd.
According to data provided by the George Mason University Elections project, more than 6.4 million Americans have cast ballots across the country, and that’s up from 5.1 million Tuesday afternoon.
These are big numbers. Check out some of the swing-state highlights:
- More than 800,000 voters have cast ballots in Ohio.
- In North Carolina, more than 720,000 voters have shown up in-person to cast their ballots since last Thursday, creating long lines that have state elections officials asking for help to deal with the volume of voters. More than 30% of ballots have been cast by African-American voters, a disproportionate percentage.
- In Florida nearly a million have cast absentee ballots, and in-person early voting doesn’t start until this coming Saturday.
Floridians would have been able to vote in-person today if the Republican-controlled state legislature hadn’t shrunk their early voting period from 14 to 8 days. But as we reported on PoliticsNation earlier this week, through programs like Operation Lemonade, voting rights activists are working hard to make lemonade out lemons and get people to the polls even in the reduced time-frame.
North Carolina isn’t the only state where voters have faced long lines. Tennesseans and Nevadans have been standing in line to vote, along with Georgians, some of whom have faced lines 3-hours long. So far, polling data seems to suggest Pres. Obama is pretty far ahead in early voting, which much come as good news to the campaign, since the president and first lady have both pushed supporters to vote early as they campaign. If you’ve seen long lines or anything else noteworthy at your local polling place, we want to see pictures of it. Send those photos along to us, along with any other important voting stories you see: PoliticsNationVotes@nbcuni.com
Morgan Whitaker Recommended
