US Election: 100 million people have voted before Election Day

More than 100 million people have cast their ballots ahead of Election Day, representing more than 70 per cent of all votes cast in the 2016 presidential election.

The massive early voting turnout during the 2020 presidential election is nearly double the early votes cast in 2016, when a total of 137 million ballots were cast in that year’s election.

This year’s overall turnout is on pace to surpass that number, with millions more Americans expected to head to the polls and deliver mail-in ballots to elections officials with votes cast for dozens of local and federal races across the US.

Among the 20 states that report party affiliation with their vote totals, Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 10 million, according to the US Elections Project, a nonpartisan website tracking county-level voting data from University of Florida professor Michael McDonald.

Of those states, registered Democrats have cast more than 21.5 million ballots in the general election, compared to 14.5 million ballots cast by registered Republicans, as of Monday.

Hawaii, Montana, Texas and Washington (a state that only votes by mail) have already surpassed entire vote totals from 2016 during the early voting period. Several other states have reached more than 90 per cent of their 2016 vote totals.

The early vote turnout in Hawaii reached more than 110 per cent of its 2016 turnout. In Texas, it reached 108 per cent, representing more than 9.6 million votes, or nearly 60 per cent of registered voters in the state.

More than 9 million people in Florida have cast ballots, nearly surpassing the total turnout from the 2016 election, when 9.6 million voted. That figure also represents roughly 64 per cent of the state’s registered voters who have already voted in the critical battleground state, whose 29 electoral votes are the most among swing states.

Nearly half of this year’s early votes cast came from voters in a handful of battleground states that could effectively determine whether the president or his Democratic rival wins the White House. But early turnout in several swing states still fell behind other states seeing record-breaking numbers.

Pennsylvania reached less than 40 per cent of its total 2016 turnout by Monday night.

From a Philadelphia campaign rally in the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Monday night, Joe Biden announced that “millions of Americans have already voted, close to 100 million, and millions more will vote tomorrow.”

“My message to you is simple,” he said. "The power to change this country is in your hands. In your hands. I don’t care how Donald Trump tries, there’s nothing, nothing, that’s going to stop the people of this nation from voting. When America votes, America will be heard."

As turnout shatters records, court rulings across the US have dismissed repeat attempts from Republican-led lawsuits to invalidate ballots and prevent states from extending deadlines for mail-in ballots that were postmarked by Election Day.

On Monday, a federal court judge in Texas struck down a GOP attempt to toss out 127,000 “drive-through” ballots cast in Harris County, the nation’s third largest county, where Hillary Clinton won by roughly 162,000 votes.

And in Nevada, a state judge denied an emergency request from the Trump campaign to change how ballots are counted in Democratic-leaning Clark County.

The US Supreme Court, on which the president has signalled he will rely to challenge election results, has also rejected Republican attempts to block mail-in ballot deadline extensions in North Carolina and declined a review of similar extensions in Pennsylvania, though it appeared open to reviewing the case after Election Day.