A Complete Guide To Early And Absentee Voting

What Does Early Voting Data Tell Us?

For those who can't wait to get this election over with, there's good news — early voting is starting.

The bad news: That only applies to you if you live in one of 37 states that offer some kind of early voting (in person, absentee or by mail) without an excuse needed.

More than 1 in 3 people is expected to cast a ballot early this year. On Friday, voters in Minnesota and South Dakota can start turning in absentee ballots. On Saturday, they can do so in Vermont, and ballots will go out in New Jersey.

Voters have already had the chance to go to the polls in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., which started holding early in-person voting Monday. (In Wisconsin, each municipality and county sets its early voting dates.)

Over the next three weeks, voters in a third of the country will already be able to vote.

Beware The Spin

Early voting could account for up to 34 percent of the vote this year, according to Michael McDonald, associate professor of political science at the University of Florida and founder of the Elections Project, which tracks turnout.

He predicts that voting methods such as in-person and all-mail ballots will become the future of exercising democracy. There are even states that operate without physical polling locations, relying solely on the mail during an election — Washington, Oregon and Colorado. And as Americans start to cast their tickets (some as early as September), those votes will carefully be dissected by both campaigns.

"Early votes will give us a good contour of who's enthused to show up to vote," McDonald explained.

When the absentee ballots begin to flow in, a campaign could spin the numbers in whatever direction it wants. But those reactions will most likely be overwrought. The Trump campaign could spin mail-in votes as an indicator of the polls being wrong (if they still show Clinton ahead), but that would likely be a false reading, McDonald said. That's because registered Republicans tend to vote by mail in bigger numbers than Democrats, and Democrats tend to use early in-person voting more often.

"Romney in 2012 put out records that he was crushing it in Ohio," McDonald said. "They were saying the polls are wrong, look at how well he's doing there. Well, he lost Ohio."

A point-in-time comparison is a better indicator of how well a candidate is doing in a certain state. By comparing the data and trends of early voting from previous election cycles, the campaigns will know if citizens are passionate enough about their platform to participate in voting — and if campaigns are hitting their marks.

"Early voters are people who have already made up their minds," McDonald said. "Clinton and Trump supporters will vote right now, and it won't matter what happens until Election Day. They're well-educated and dedicated."

This could be a component for each of the campaigns' successes or failures, especially in battleground states that allow early and no-excuse absentee ballot voting. Florida, for instance, saw almost 4 in 10 people vote early (20 percent early in-person, 19 percent absentee). Professor Paul Gronke of Reed College and founder of the record-low favorability ratings, Clinton and Trump supporters tend to be pretty earliest movement for absentee voting began during the Civil War. Soldiers on both sides wanted to cast their ballots in the 1864 election. Several state legislators hashed out the details: How would the votes be cast? How would voter fraud and coercion votes be curtailed? And how would the votes be delivered?

Despite these sizable challenges, 25 Union states passed some form of absentee voting for soldiers battling in the muddy and bloody trenches.

"Some say Abraham Lincoln might not have been elected if they weren't allowed to vote," McDonald said.

Since then, the absentee ballot has evolved to include the sick and the elderly, business people who frequently travel and others who can provide valid reasons for being out of state, like students in college in a different state. There are currently 27 states and the District of Columbia that do not require any reason to request an absentee ballot.

By the 1990s, many states took up early in-person voting measures, which allowed individuals to cast their ballots at a polling location during a specific period of time before Election Day.

Is Early And Absentee Voting Prone To Voter Fraud?

"The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this — in Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on," Trump said at a campaign event in Altoona, Pa. "I hope you people can sort of not just vote on the 8th, go around and look and watch other polling places, and make sure that it's 100 percent fine."

But, according to McDonald, the chances of voter fraud occurring at polling locations is slim.

"If we look at the weakness in the election system," McDonald said, "it's not at the polling places. There is impression fraud, but it's so rare."

So rare, in fact, that there were only about 31 separate incidents of possible voter fraud since 2000, based on data collected by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School. This includes general, primary, special and municipal elections from 2000 to 2014.

To put that in perspective, there were 1 billion ballots cast in the general and primary elections during that time. That's 0.000000031 percent.

Some of these incidents may not have been an attempt to actually participate in voter fraud, but could have resulted in data entry errors, a mix-up of matching different people with the same name — or someone accidentally signing in as the wrong person in a poll book.

However, there is a bigger risk of voter fraud when it comes to absentee and mail-in ballots, McDonald pointed out.

"Again, this is small, not a huge problem," he noted. "Local elections are the most vulnerable, not presidential elections."

There were 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012, according to an How it works, per McDonald: Voters request electronic delivery of the ballot, either by email or by a secured website where the ballot may be downloaded. The voter then prints out the ballot, completes it and signs it. Now, if the state permits electronic ballot return, the voter will scan the completed ballot and send it either by email or by uploading it to the secured website.

If the state does not allow electronic ballot transmission, the voter must print out and assemble a privacy envelope to deliver the ballot, which McDonald said officials call the "origami project." When officials receive the ballot, they check the signature against the one on file with the voter's voter-registration application.

This option is only available for uniformed military (stationed both abroad and domestically) and overseas citizens through the voting act. However, Alaska was the first state to extend the electronic ballot delivery and return option to everyone.

"It starts in the military and goes down to the general public," McDonald said. "That's usually how this stuff happens."

That seemed to be the case with absentee voting and the Civil War. "I believe more states will follow Alaska's lead to expand ballot electronic delivery and return in the future," McDonald said.

But don't expect the transition to occur anytime soon. With the recent hack in Arizona and Illinois until Nov. 7)

Oct. 10 – Los Angeles County, Calif. (early voting is set by counties/municipalities. LA County has earliest — until Nov. 7), Maine (until Nov. 7), Montana (absentee ballots all locations)

Oct. 29 – Florida (until Nov. 5),

States without no-excuse early voting: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia

Sources: National Conference of State Legislatures, various state websites