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Archive: Previous Election Memos

North Carolina Early and Absentee Voting in 2024 and 2020

North Carolina is a crucial swing state in the election, and one that may deliver results relatively quickly. To get a sense of where we are before polls close, let’s look at what votes have already been cast: early and absentee votes.

Memo / November 05, 2024

State Report: North Carolina 2024

North Carolina is a swing state expected to be important to the presidential candidates in the general election. Given this significance, it is useful to examine its election administration and primary election results. Changes in election policies can indicate what key issues may be encountered within the state. Turnout and results from the primary can also provide insight into what is to come in the state’s general election.

Memo / July 26, 2024

Archive: Previous Data Visualizations

November 2024

Mail Ballots Cast

Last updated November 5, 2024

mail_20241105_0 — This graph shows counts of accepted mail in ballots for 2020 and 2024 by party, starting one month before the election. Mail ballot counts climbed gradually in both 2020 and 2024 though there were significantly more in 2020 than in 2024 for all parties. 2 day prior to the election 68,000 Republicans, 92,000 Democrats, and 103,000 voters with no party affiliation or a minor party affiliation have cast ballots. At the equivalent time in 2020, 210,000 Republicans, 430,000 Democrats, and 350,000 voters with no party affiliation or a minor party affiliation had cast ballots.

November 2024

Early Voting

Last updated November 4, 2024

early_20241104 — This graph shows counts of early in person voting for 2020 and 2024 by party, starting one month before the election and ending 3 days before the election when early voting ended. In person voting began roughly 20 days before the election in both years. 3 days prior to the election roughly 1,420,000 Republicans, 1,360,000 Democrats, and 1,440,000 voters with no party affiliation or a minor party affiliation have cast ballots. At the equivalent time in 2020, 1,260,000 Republicans, 1,280,000 Democrats, and 1,090,000 voters with no party affiliation or a minor party affiliation had cast ballots.

October 2024

Voter Registration

Last updated October 17, 2024

The number of new voters is calculated every week using the snapshots of the North Carolina voter file that are posted by the state's Board of Elections. Throughout the 2024 pre-election period, the North Carolina voter file online snapshots have been posted on the weekend, and the date on our plot is the first workday after each update of the online voter file.

20241017 (4) — The number of newly registered voters in North Carolina every week from early July through late September, split into Republicans, Democrats, and other registered voters. The changes are measured week by week, from Saturday through Friday. The number of newly registered Democrats and Republicans has tracked very closely, with both parties averaging about 2,000 new registrants a week in early July, climbing to between 4,000 and 5,000 a week throughout August, and reaching about 7,000 to 8,000 in September. Democrats have outpaced Republicans by a few hundred new registrants each week since the beginning of August, but both are as little as half the number of new registrants who are neither Democrats nor Republicans, and the edge in newly registered Democrats may have slightly narrowed with the start of September.

About our Process

To avoid double-counting registrations that were approved on a Monday, each data point represents the number of new registrants from the previous Tuesday through the Monday indicated, inclusive. Importantly, the last date on the x axis is also set to be at least two weeks before the date when we actually conduct the analysis. This two week buffer aims to balance two priorities: providing the most recent data possible, and the completeness of the data that we post.

Although snapshots of the voter file are made available each weekend, registrations may not be processed immediately, and there is no number of days after which a registration application is guaranteed to have been processed. Preliminary tests indicated that the days immediately preceding each update of the voter file shows notably low new voter registration, simply because any registration attempts on (e.g.) a Friday are unlikely to be processed before the voter file is updated one day later on Saturday, so a plot that spans up to the current date could give the inaccurate impression that the number of new registrants has suddenly fallen when really their applications have simply not yet been processed. For this reason, previous data points on our plots may rise slightly as older applications are processed.

Two more decisions affect the values in our plots, and may also cause small movements among older data points:

First, we only count registrations that have a status code of either Active or Temporary, omitting Denied, Removed, or Inactive registrations. If a voter switches from one of these categories to another, it could affect the number of Active or Temporary registrants as of a given date.

Second, because our goal is to understand the current electorate of North Carolina, we always use the most recent snapshot of the voter file in order to compute the number of new registrants as of a certain date. This means that if a voter were to register for the first time in (say) the last week of July, but then leave the voter file for any reason before we post our plot in (say) September, our data point for the number of newly registered voters in the last week of July will decrease by one in the September plot compared to the same data point on a plot from July. The specific quantity that we are plotting is therefore the number of currently registered voters in North Carolina with either Active or Temporary status who originally registered in a given week.