Over 50 Million Americans Have Already Voted, Breaking Early Voting Records (UPDATE)

As states have started to open up early voting for the Nov. 3 election, a record-breaking 50 million American have already cast their ballot.

October 16, 2020

UPDATED 10/23, 3:11 p.m. ET: Early voting has surpassed 50 million ballots, breaking a record with 11 days still left until the Nov. 3 election.

The early voting numbers passed the 2016 height of 47.1 million. “Voters across the nation have already cast more than 38 percent of all the votes that were counted in the 2016 presidential election,” the New York Timesreports.

UPDATED 10/22, 4:44 p.m. ET: Americans continue to shatter early-voting records.

According to data compiled by Elections Project, more than 47 million have already cast their vote for the 2020 race. That figure is slightly higher than the total early-vote count in the 2016 presidential cycle—and there's still 12 days left until Election Day.

Election Projects reports that as of Thursday, 33,573,673 mail-in ballots have been cast, while 13,963,938 Americans have voted in-person. The data also shows Democrats are outvoting Republicans in states that provide party registration statistics, with the former group making up about 50.9 percent of these votes, and the latter about 26 percent.

See the original story below.

As states have started to open up early voting for the Nov. 3 election, a record breaking figure of over 17 million American have already cast their vote.

According to the U.S. Elections Project, over 17 million have cast their ballots already, a figure that represents 12 percent of the total 138 million Americans who voted in the 2016 elections. It's already expected that voter turnout is expected to be on the higher end this election, but states that have opened early voting have already seen numbers double what the early voting figures looked like in 2016.

For example, as per CNN, Florida has seen over two million vote already, far surpassing the 992,584 who voted early in the state in 2016. Michigan also saw a dramatic rise in early voting, going from 369,721 in 2016 to 1,150,224 in 2020. California, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia have also seen over one million votes already cast. "We can be certain this will be a high-turnout election," said University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald, who spoke about the turnout so far with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"It’s just very different from any other presidential election that any of us have witnessed," Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Huff Post. "There are several forces coming together to make this happen." While it's no doubt early voter turnout was likely boosted due to the coronavirus pandemic, which isn't going away anytime soon, some election experts have indicated there's other factors at play, too.

Videos showing lines across North Carolina and Georgia illustrate how eager some are to cast their vote, especially with Donald Trump appearing more unhinged than ever.