Americans embrace early voting, with tens of millions votes cast ahead of Election Day 2024
Election Day may be Tuesday, but more than 68 million people have already cast their votes across the country.
Here in California, more than 6 million people have already voted either by mail or in-person. That is nearly 34% of the total voter turnout in 2020.
But it is turnout in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina that most likely will decide who will be the next president. Early voting in those states is considerably higher than in California, with the exception of Pennsylvania which stands at only 24% of its 2020 vote total.
Georgia is one of the swing states where early voting has taken off. Nearly 3.7 million ballots have already been cast, which is roughly 74% of all the people who voted in 2020.
"The message from Donald Trump was please vote early," said Betsy Young, the GOP chair for Towns County, Georgia. "We are Trump country here and we listened to what he said."
But Democrats say Georgia's surge in early voting is actually a byproduct of voter suppression efforts by Republicans, who have limited mail-in ballot options.
"Despite the government making it harder to cast their ballot, people are willing to fight to make it happen anyway," said Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former Georgia gubernatorial candidate. "So they're showing up, they're standing in lines they shouldn't have to stand in because they believe their voices matter and that this election matters."
Wisconsin, which is seeing low early-voting among the swing states, is getting last-minute attention from the major presidential candidates. Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held rallies Friday in Milwaukee.
But even though voting will end on Tuesday, the battle for the White House could stretch for days as mail-in ballots are counted and post-voting maneuvers possibly kick in. Swing state officials are already bracing for a flurry of lawsuits.
"We've already talked to the governor's office about lining up special assistant attorney generals, because frankly we don't know who's going to win, and who wins will decide who sues us," said Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state's office.
In Southern California, more than 100 voting centers are already open in L.A. County and more than 500 others open Saturday.
