For a growing number of Americans, election day is already here.
Polling day may be officially set for November 5, but in several states early voting is under way, with tens of millions of Americans expected to cast their ballots before then.
In-person voting began on Friday in three states — Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia. A handful of others, including Alabama and Wisconsin, have started mailing absentee ballots to voters who have requested them, and several more will follow suit in the coming weeks.
“Happy voting season!” declared one Democratic party activist outside a government building in Arlington, Virginia, on Friday, where several hundred voters lined up before the polls opened at 8am to be among the first in the country to cast their ballots for the White House.
“We want to win in October, not November 5,” said Rose Fabia, a 65-year-old Democratic party volunteer wearing an “I VOTED” sticker on her lapel.
“It is psychological, showing to the other side that we have the numbers.”
About 20 miles, or 32km, away, outside a polling station in nearby Fairfax, Virginia, Mary Lyn Field-Nguer, 76, was also leafleting for the Democrats after casting her own ballot for Kamala Harris.
“I really wanted to be the first person in line,” Field-Nguer added. “Anything could happen, and if anything prevented me from voting I would never forgive myself.”
Voters have long been able to request absentee ballots in advance of US elections. But the practice of early voting — either in person or by mail — exploded four years ago in the Covid-19 pandemic. A record of more than 100mn Americans exercised their franchise before election day in 2020.
While it remains unclear whether a new record for early voting will be set this election cycle, there are strong signs that the practice remains popular in many parts of the country.
According to the US Census Bureau, just under half of people casting ballots in the 2022 midterms voted before election day — a trend experts say is likely to continue this year.
On Friday morning in Arlington, a queue of waiting voters had already stretched on to a second floor of the government building within the first hour of the polls being open.
Gretchen Reinemeyer, who has been general registrar and director of elections for Arlington county since 2019, said the precinct could “easily be on track” to match the number of early votes seen on the first day of voting in 2020, when some 1,400 people cast ballots.
“Any October surprise is probably going to have less potency because so many early votes have already been banked,” said J Miles Coleman, a non-partisan analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Arlington, just outside Washington DC, is a heavily Democratic area: the county backed Joe Biden by an 81-17 margin over Donald Trump there in 2020. Biden won statewide in Virginia by a 10-point margin.
A small but critical share of the electorate swung to the right the following year in an off-year governor’s election to support the more-moderate Republican Glenn Youngkin, and on Friday morning several Republican volunteers were also outside the polling station encouraging people to back Trump over Harris.
The Financial Times poll tracker shows Harris with a lead of more than seven points over Trump in Virginia, but some recent surveys of the state have suggested the race may be closer.
GOP volunteers in Arlington were also urging people to vote early.
“You never know what is going to happen on election day,” said Matthew Hurtt, chair of the Arlington Republicans, who added that “from a campaign perspective,” voting early also helped organisers better target their efforts in the run-up to polling day.
While people’s votes are kept secret, records are updated in near real-time showing how many ballots have been cast and who has already voted. That allows campaigns and both political parties to stop reaching out to people who have cast ballots, and focus their resources on those who have not.
“It takes you off the list to receive mailers and to receive other campaign materials, so you save the campaign money and you save your mailbox,” Hurtt added.
Still, early voting has emerged as a divisive issue among Republicans in particular, who have tended to favour voting in person on election day over early voting in recent cycles.
Trump has sowed distrust in the electoral system and continued to maintain, without evidence, that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him. The former president has repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting in particular is a major source of fraud, and earlier this month he vowed that if elected president again, he would prosecute anyone who “cheats” in this year’s ballot.
In Fairfax, Katie Gorka, chair of the Fairfax County Republican Committee and a former Trump administration official, questioned why voters needed access to expansive early voting now that the pandemic was over.
“But as long as these are the rules we encourage Republicans to abide by them so that we can win,” she added.
“The whole Republican party is trying to get people to vote early because the Dems vote early,” said Bart Marcois, a 60-year-old consultant who cast his ballot for Trump in Fairfax. “We show up on election day and say ‘yay we had a big turn out’ but theirs is already in the bag.”
“They’re harvesting ballots and carrying them in,” Marcois added, in an apparent reference to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that Democrats are submitting illegal ballots. “Every Republican is worried about fraud.”
Other Republican voters, however, were more optimistic.
“Voting is just one of the most important gifts our Founding Fathers gave to this country,” said Mariam Bell, a 69-year-old retiree holding a “Women for Trump” sign in Fairfax.
“This is not about Republicans or Democrats, though, it’s about elites versus the average American,” she added. “Trump understands this and has changed the paradigm.”