Swing state officials think polling sites could be 'ghost towns' after early vote surge

Election officials think the early vote in many battleground states has been so robust that on Election Day itself, polling places could be a "ghost town," The Associated Press reported Friday evening.

In Georgia alone, according to the report, more than 4 million votes could end up being cast before Tuesday, through a combination of mail-in ballots and early in-person voting. To put that into perspective, the total vote in Georgia in 2020 from all combined methods was less than 5 million.

"Early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana," said the report. Part of the reason for the shift is that "During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it" — but this time, Trump and the GOP have made an aggressive push for people to vote early.

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The effect of this could also be less polarization between the early vote and the Election Day vote; in previous elections, the early vote skewed heavily Democratic while in-person votes were heavily Republican.

As of press time, "about 64 million people have cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to AP Elections Data" — however, this doesn't necessarily indicate Republicans are leading in early vote, as many people registered with one party vote for the other. Indeed, polling of early voters suggests Vice President Kamala Harris has a large lead with them.

Gabriel Sterling, a Republican election official in Georgia who has pushed back on Trump's prior conspiracy theories about election security, said, “There’s a possibility it could be a ghost town on Election Day. We had less than a million show up during COVID in 2020 with all the uses of pre-Election Day voting.”