Getting Ready to Compare 2010 & 2012 In-Person Early Voting for 2014's

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.

10-12 Update on NC Mail-in Absentee Ballots

The third weekend prior to Election Day means things are starting to heat up when it comes to voter mobilization and ground-game activities, and we starting to see the numbers tighten up within the requested ballots for North Carolina's mail-in absentee ballots.

Through Saturday (10-11), we have crossed the 40,000 mark in terms of mail-in absentee ballots: on Friday, we saw the total reach 40,682 (a 7 percent increase from the day before) and on Saturday, it was 41,755 (a 3 percent increase).

As of Saturday, the number of requested mail-in ballots coming from registered Democrats were 15,905, making them 38 percent of the requested mail-in ballots, while registered Republicans were 15,828, or 37.9 percent. Unaffiliated voters were 9,911, or 23.7 percent of the requests.

White voters are 82 percent, with black voters at 12 percent of the requested mail-in ballots.  Women are 56.5 percent, while men are 42.4 percent.

Of these 40,000 plus mail-in ballot requests, 20 percent, or 8,517 ballots, have been returned and accepted as votes for the November 4 election. We certainly don't know what these votes are in terms of various contests, but registered Democrats continue their significant lead in returned and accepted ballots.

Among these registered voters who have returned their ballots and accepted as votes, 42 percent are from registered Democrats, slightly down from their trend of 43-44 percent over the past few weeks. Registered Republicans are 36 percent of the returned & accepted ballots, which they have held over the past few days.  Registered unaffiliated voters are 21 percent.

Women continue at 54 percent of returned and accepted ballots, while white voters are 82 percent and black voters are 13 percent.

In comparing this year's cumulative numbers of accepted ballots, Democrats continue their significant numbers over four years ago in the last mid-term election (72 percent over their 2010 numbers at this point).  Unaffiliated voters are also significantly ahead of their 2010 day-to-day comparison numbers, up 55 percent. Republican voters are at the same number from 2010's same day-to-day numbers, only up 1 percent.

Finally, looking at how these voters who have requested mail-in ballots for this year's election, we see another distinct pattern regarding this year's voters so far, with only 20 percent of this year's mail-in voters having used the same method in 2010.

Of this year's voters, 41 percent did not vote in 2010, meaning that they either didn't cast ballots in the last mid-term election or were not in the state four years ago.