The Nov. 3 election is just under a month away, but voters are already casting ballots in more than a dozen states. California, Montana and Nebraska began early voting on Monday, with Indiana, New Mexico, Ohio and Wyoming scheduled to begin Tuesday, according to information posted online by officials in those states.
Election officials have sent voters in Illinois 1,036,090 ballots, and more than 41,000 have been returned, according to the Illinois State Board of Elections Office. By this point in the 2022 midterm elections, fewer than 620,000 ballots had been sent to voters, according to the Illinois election data.
The state of Illinois is “way ahead this year” compared to 2022, Public Information Officer Matt Dietrich of the Illinois Board of Elections wrote in an email to Straight Arrow.
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Democrats and Republicans split on voting strategies
Early data so far mirrors historic trends in each party, with Democrats embracing early voting, and Republicans demonstrating a preference for voting in person on Election Day, which falls on Nov. 3 this year.
President Donald Trump has given conflicting messages on the issue. In 2024, Trump encouraged “early mail-in voting” in Michigan, and “Early voting” in Pennsylvania, then in 2025 called to “END MAIL-IN VOTING” and to “BAN MAIL-IN VOTING,” before encouraging early voting this June and voting by mail himself in August. Trump’s effort to use the United States Postal Service to restrict mail-in voting this year was blocked last month by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court did recently approve of Trump’s plan to allow states to use Social Security and other data to look for ineligible people casting votes.
Early numbers so far
In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, more than 1 million applications for mail ballots have already been approved so far — including 700,000 for Democrats and 250,000 for Republicans, according to data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of State.
In Minnesota, more than 426,000 absentee and mail ballots have been sent to general election voters so far, compared to 343,000 in 2022, the Secretary of State’s office announced recently. In Maine, more than 70,000 ballots have been requested and more than 45,000 have been issued, according to the Secretary of State’s office.
In Nebraska, where voting by mail began last week, more than 164,000 ballots have been issued, and 7,763 have been received and accepted as of Monday, according to a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office.
