According to political expert John Couvillon, there are a lot less early voters and mail-in ballot requests for the current presidential contest than there were at this stage of the 2020 election cycle.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, stated in a piece for the New York Post that the results of the Republican strategist’s early voting are “nowhere near what some people estimated.”
Couvillon reports that as of Thursday, 4.2 million Americans had cast ballots, which is a 45 percent decrease from the same time frame during the contest between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
For instance, fewer than 459,000 early voters in Virginia cast ballots in person, a decrease of almost 4% from 2020.
According to Couvillon’s data, the number of requests for mail-in ballots has also drastically decreased. In areas where ballots are not automatically mailed to voters, requests have decreased by 58% from 2020.
In Georgia and North Carolina, two battleground states, voters are requesting to vote by mail at rates of 84% and 75% lower, respectively, highlighting this sharp decline.
It seems like more folks are holding off until election day.
Olsen stated, “Voters in this area simply do not want to vote by mail when in-person early voting is widely available.”
The swing state figures are particularly noteworthy, even accounting for the rush of mail-in voting that occurred during the coronavirus outbreak.
The analyst noted that it is “impossible to spin them into good news for Harris,” despite the fact that it is difficult to interpret this data.
Olsen continued, “It is feasible to interpret what this means for both candidates: There is still a lot of time to impact the race with campaign stops, messages, and strategies.”
