Now that North Carolina has seen the first day of in-person early voting come to end, we just have to wait for the NC State Board of Elections to release the numbers, sometime early Friday morning.
Until then, a little refresher on what we saw in 2010 and 2012 in 17 days of in-person early voting (reminder: this year's in-person early voting is only ten days) in the Old North State.
In 2010, a little over 904,000 ballots came during the state-wide in-person early voting period in the last mid-term election, with ballots from registered Democrats being anywhere from 44 to 47 percent of the cumulative totals, registered Republicans generally at 36 to 38 percent, and unaffiliated voters at a constant 17 percent of the total votes for each day.
Registered Democrats ended up with nearly 426,000 votes, registered Republicans a little over 325,000, and registered unaffiliated voters casting a little over 153,000 in-person early ballots in the last mid-term election.
In 2012's presidential election, nearly 2,550,000 in-person early votes were cast, with registered Democrats being anywhere from 45 percent to 60 percent of the ballots cast each day, with registered Republicans anywhere from 20 percent to 35 percent, and unaffiliated voters ranging from 16 to 24 percent of the daily totals.
By the end of in-person early voting in 2012, 1.2 million ballots had come from registered Democrats, 767,560 from registered Republicans, and 520,694 from registered unaffiliated voters.
It will be interesting to see where 2014's numbers are: whether they are more like a traditional NC mid-term election (2010) or a presidential election (2012). It is unlikely that they would be anything like 2012, but perhaps closer to to that level than to 2010's would be an early guess.