More than 100 million voters have already cast their ballots as polling locations open across the country on Election Day.
Early Tuesday morning, data analyst John Couvillon tweeted that 100,612,403 people participated in early in-person voting or voting by mail. The total represents nearly three-quarters of the total number of votes cast in 2016, 136 million.
[PREDICT TUESDAY’S WINNER WITH THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER’S INTERACTIVE ELECTORAL MAP]
EARLY VOTING BY STATE (11/3 VERSION): pic.twitter.com/YXJOYrqYA1
— John Couvillon (@WinWithJMC) November 3, 2020
Five states have already met or surpassed their total votes cast in the last presidential election: Hawaii, Montana, Nevada, Texas, and Washington.
Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, and North Carolina have all reported greater than 95% of 2016’s total counts.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday became the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon to win by unanimous vote the New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch, defeating President Trump 5-0 just after midnight.
Despite early results from small municipalities such as Dixville Notch, a winner may not be called on Election Day. The record-breaking number of mail-in ballots cast across the country have to be counted, and in 34 states, mail-in ballots are not allowed to be counted until Election Day. Seventeen of those states are not allowed to start counting until after the polls have closed, according to Ballotpedia.
In Pennsylvania, seven counties Trump won in 2016 said they did not have the resources to count mail-in ballots on Election Day and would hold off on counting until Wednesday.
On Sunday night, Trump said that he was prepared to start a legal battle to cut off collecting ballots after Election Day. He said it “wasn’t fair” the results of the election might not immediately be known.
“I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election,” Trump told reporters. “I think it’s a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that’s very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it’s a very dangerous, terrible thing. And I think it’s terrible when we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election in a modern-day age of computers. I think it’s a terrible thing.”
Biden is favored to win the presidential election. FiveThirtyEight shows Biden with an 8-point lead on Trump headed into Election Day.
