There are 720,694 early in-person ballots processed by the State Board of Elections in NC as of this morning. We finally have enough leverage–and enough days–to compare the turnout rates and trajectory to previous elections.
Signs of a rising Democratic tide, at least in this one state, appear to be accurate. The gap between the 2008 rate and the 2012 rate widened for the first three days of early in person voting and has held steady since then. The GOP, by comparison, is not doing much better in 2012 than they did (as a proportion of identifiers) in 2008.
We’ll be updating these graphics every few days as early voting continues.
Data from NC Board of Elections Website
(This post is co-authored with Jacob Canter, Reed sophomore junior and EVIC research assistant)
The early ballots are beginning to pile up in North Carolina, and we can finally start to discern some patterns of turnout by partisanship and by race.
As Michael McDonald has pointed out on Friday, it’s important in this state (as in many states) to carefully discriminate between ballots requested and returned by mail–no excuse absentee ballots–and ballots that are cast in person at an early voting location. What makes the NC situation a bit confusing for any new to early voting is that the state describes both modes of balloting as “absentee” voting; the early in-person variant is called “one-stop absentee voting” because the absentee ballot is requested “in-person.” Turnout reports are merged into a single file; the critical field in this file is “Ballot Request Type” which contains entries for “Mail”, “In Person”, “Overseas”, and “Military.”
The first graphic reports the number of ballots returned (and in the case of by mail ballots, accepted) as a proportion of all registered voters, by party. The interesting pattern to notice here is the sudden increase in Democratic turnout on the 20th-18th days before the election. This corresponds to the start of early in-person voting.
The underlying data show that Republicans use by-mail voting at a much higher rate in the state than do Democrats (the first graphic of raw returns is useful in NC only because the proportions of party registrants is roughly comparable–I need to have Jacob reproduce these as proportions of party registrants later this week).
The second graphic shows that of the ballots requested there is only a slight difference in the rate of return by party. This is what McDonald refers to as the lack of substantially higher Republican enthusiasm in the state at this point.
Finally, the in-person rates by race illustrate both the stronger preference for this method among African Americans in the state, and of course, help account for a large portion of the party pattern observed above. In my opinion, it’s a bit early to conclude much about Democratic mobilization efforts until we have another few days of data. We’ll work on comparing these trend lines to 2008 in a few days.
In Kitsap County, WA, heavy stock used to produce the ballot means that two stamps will be needed to return it by mail.
Dirty not very well-kept secret: USPS will deliver it anyway, and the county office had pledged to make up the difference.
And now a quick look at party returns. Keep in mind that early in-person (“one stop absentee”) has only just begun in North Carolina. These first days should reveal a surge of African-American turnout for Obama, if patterns from 2008 hold. In four or five more days, we will finally have enough data to start to compare the mobilization efforts of Obama and Romney in the state.
The one-stop absentee voting option has begun in North Carolina, and in-person votes are going to quickly swamp the no-excuse absentee by-mail ballots.
As of the close of balloting last night, the absentee ballot file includes 337,609 records. The breakdown of these by type of ballot is as follows:
However, as anyone who is familiar with by-mail and in-person voting knows, there are racial and partisan differences underlying these data.
As shown below, 92% of the by-mail absentee ballot requests were made by White voters while only 61.8% of the one-stop returns (thus far) have come from White voters. (By the way, 40%, or 60,957 White voters have returned their by-mail ballots compared to 34% or 4406 of Black voters.) This is the main reason that states that have tried to shorten the early in-person voting period without altering the absentee by-mail period have faced close scrutiny.
Image from www.pb.com
I just got off of a series of phone calls with reporters who are asking about absentee ballots and how they are treated by elections officials.
While the administrative rules and procedures vary by state (as with almost everything in American elections), there are some consistent patterns that reporters need to understand.
- Processing:
Absentee ballots go through a number of steps before they are fed into a counting machine. The signature on the external envelope needs to be verified. This is done either with a computer or with a human, and there are always backups when signatures are deemed questionable. The ballot is then separated from the external envelope–this is done to maintain the secrecy of the ballot (except in North Carolina where, at least in the past, it was possible to relink the two via a security code).A few states are “voter intent” states (California, Oregon, Washington, perhaps others), and in these states, the ballots are then examined and “remade” by ballot review boards. In other states (e.g. Arkansas) this process does not take place unless an absentee ballot is rejected by the ballot counting machine. - Scanning:
Ballots are then typically scanned using an optical character recognition machine. This information is stored on a memory card. - Tabulating:
Finally, at some point, an elections official hits the “tabulate” button that provides the candidate totals for the absentee ballots which have been scanned into the machine. There is not, of course, a big Staples type “total” button–what this practically means is that the machine creates a report that contains a number of pieces of information, such as total ballots counted, total ballots accepted, total votes for each candidate in each race, and, depending on the report, candidate totals by precinct.
(Here is an example of one such report from Bay County, FL from the November 2011 election.)
It’s important to understand these distinctions, because many journalists don’t realize that “scanning” is not the same as “tabulating.” Continue reading
I came across “The American Mosaic” data exploration tool that draws on tracking poll data from Reuters/IPSOS.
This is a really well-implemented tool, and I encourage everyone to look at it.
I’m not quite sure what to conclude from the early voting numbers, plotted here and available by clicking this link (bloggers who want to grab a permalink from this site–click on the “share” button and you can grab the URL).
On the one hand, they show a pretty consistent 15 point advantage in the Obama vote among those respondents who say they have cast an early vote.
I looked more closely at the data, and they show 36.9% of the respondent pool thus far say they are Democrats versus 31.7% Republican. That is 3% above (Dem) / below (GOP) Gallup’s current estimate of party affiliation among likely voters.
What makes this hard to evaluate is that the states which currently have sent out absentee ballots are not a random subset of the nation as a whole. Nonetheless, in another week or so, these figures might start to give us a real sense of how the early vote is shaping up.
A number of reporters have asked me how early voting may have changed campaigns. I describe a longer period of voter mobilization. I describe get out the early vote rallies, such as Obama is holding in Illinois this week. And I talk about how Election Day has been changed from a day where half or more of the citizenry go to a local school, community building, or government office to cast a ballot to the end of a two or three week period of balloting.
But sometimes a picture tells a thousand words, and I think the graphic below, comparing early voting rates in North Carolina in 2004, 2008, and for the first five of early voting in 2012, says it all.
If you were campaigning in the Tarheel State in 2004, elections were all about the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. A few days before the 2004 election, about 15% of Democrats and Republicans had voted early. A week out, less than 10% of ballots were cast. These voters mattered, of course, especially in a close contest, but campaigns kept their resources in check to focus on the 85% of partisans who cast an Election Day ballot.
In 2008, Barack Obama’s candidacy was the trumpet of Joshua that felled the Election Day wall. Anyone familiar with the 2008 race cannot forget the long lines of Black voters waiting in the Fall heat to cast a historic vote for the candidate who would eventually be elected as our first African American president.
But it wasn’t just Obama. Usage among Republican and Unaffiliated voters also leapt in response to the key legislative change: making absentee voting a “one-stop” process, essentially converting it into early in-person voting. The result was that 2.6 million out of 4.4 million ballots were cast early and, at least for Democrats, half of those came in 7 or more days before Election Day.
Fast forward to 2012. Once again, voters are enduring long early voting lines. Democratic rates in particular are exceeding 2008 rates. Republicans are lagging, but still are turning out earlier than in 2008. And any candidate who wants to win the state has to be already on the ground, because if they aren’t, their opponent could be 30-40% ahead by election day.
Image courtesy of the Winston Salem Journal