The election has officially begun in many states across the country, but how voters can cast their ballots varies by state. The first in-person votes took place in three states on Friday. In Minnesota and South Dakota, absentee voters were able to go to polling places. In Virginia, any registered voter can cast a ballot. Some states are sending absentee ballots to voters who are overseas or serving in the military.
The first mail-in ballots will be cast in Maryland and New Jersey on Saturday.
“Vote early. Vote absentee. Vote on Election Day. Whatever you do, but you have to vote,” former President Donald Trump told rally-goers in Atlanta in August.
With more voting options than ever before, presidential campaigns are treating every day like Election Day.
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“My fellow North Carolinians, your voice is your vote and you will make all the difference in this election,” Vice President Harris said at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on September 12.
The first large-scale early voting practice dates back to the Civil War, when many soldiers were fighting outside of state but could vote as if they were at the polls. By World War II, all states allowed soldiers to vote absentee.
“In the early 20th century, people started to realize that we had a mobile population. We had people who worked on the railroads, people who built the railroads across the country, people who traveled for business. And slowly, state by state, they introduced this option for people who had a reason to vote by mail,” said John Fortier, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Since the 1970s, some states have allowed all registered voters to vote by mail, regardless of the reason.
“In 1978, California was the first state to allow absentee voting for any reason,” Fortier said. “California and other states started looking to make voting more convenient.”
A voter marks his or her ballot at a polling place during voting in the Massachusetts primary election on Tuesday.
Some states have also begun allowing limited in-person absentee voting, with Texas and Tennessee being the first to do so.
By the 2000 election, 21 states allowed all registered voters to vote by mail if they wished. Arkansas joined Tennessee and Texas in allowing early voting for any reason. All other states offered a mail-in ballot option to absentee voters who cited a reason they could not make it to the polls on Election Day. But only 14% of voters voted early in 2000.
“Both of these trends [vote by mail and in person absentee early voting] “It's been a steady step up and improvement every year until 2020 when it rose dramatically again,” Fortier said.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of early voting rose to 69%. Mississippi was the only state to require a reason to vote early. Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Indiana offered in-person early voting. All other states allowed voting by mail. Nine states and Washington, DC, held mail-in elections in which a ballot was sent to every registered voter.
“2020 was an unusual year in which Democrats and Republicans differed greatly on the merits of voting by mail and voter turnout increased significantly,” Fortier said.
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The Trump campaign has tried to encourage voters to vote by mail, but the former president has been critical of mail-in elections in general.
“We need a fair voting system, because, as you know, we don't have a fair voting system. They're handing out millions of ballots, handing them out all over the place,” former President Trump said in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, on September 13. “Some people only get two, three, four, five votes. We have a very unfair system here. If I had run in California with a fair vote-counting system, I would have won in California.”
Eight states and Washington, D.C., still conduct all elections by mail, and New Jersey still allows smaller jurisdictions to elect by mail.
“There really is no one size fits all,” Fortier said. “There are states like Oregon and Washington that are essentially 100% vote-by-mail, with very few polling places. Some states in the Northeast and Deep South are much more traditional.”
For the 2024 election, Alabama and New Hampshire have moved to the same strict requirements as Mississippi, allowing only absentee voters with a valid excuse, such as illness, living out of state or working a shift that overlaps with a polling place's hours, to cast a mail-in ballot. Democrats have questioned the effort to restrict voting access.
(AP, left; AP/Jae C. Hong, top right; Sarah Rice for The Washington Post, via Getty Images, bottom right)
“Across our nation, we are witnessing an all-out assault on fundamental, hard-won freedoms and rights, including the freedom to vote,” Vice President Harris said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 13.
Since 2020, seven other states have eliminated mail-in voting for all voters, instead implementing early in-person voting. Overall, 36 states continue to allow voters to vote by mail.
“Personally, I think there's value in early voting, but four, five or six weeks of early voting is not necessarily better than two weeks of in-person early voting, and it's not necessarily going to increase voter turnout, and it's not necessarily more convenient,” Fortier said.
Pennsylvania was supposed to start sending out mail-in ballots on Sept. 16, but election officials clarified the timeline, saying they planned to start processing ballots that day. They noted there was a slight delay because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had requested to be removed from the November ballot.
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“I think there's certainly an intuition among people that they want the ballot, the physical ballot, to be there, and we've been moving in that direction with our ballot technology. But we also have ballots that are very complicated, we have many people voting, in a given election you may be voting in 10, 20 precincts, and that means we need to use technology to count the ballots,” Fortier said.
A similar legal battle is underway in North Carolina.
“Unfortunately, all of those ballots were printed, and now the Republican Supreme Court has ordered that all of those ballots have to be thrown out and we have to go back and reprint them,” North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said after the presidential debate in Pennsylvania.
North Carolina plans to send ballots to military and overseas voters on Friday, and federal law requires all ballots sent overseas to be sent by Sept. 21. The rest of North Carolina's absentee ballots will be sent out next week, nearly three weeks after the state's original Sept. 6 deadline for absentee voting.
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Some election officials have expressed concerns about processing and counting mail-in ballots in some states, with ballots being sent out later than originally planned, including in Pennsylvania, which will not begin processing mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
“States want to add a lot of convenience elements to voting, but they don't necessarily think about how it all fits together. If you want to have early voting in a lot of places and the ability to vote anywhere, you need a good database behind the scenes,” Fortier said.
Twelve states, including battleground state Arizona, begin processing and counting ballots before Election Day but, by law, cannot report results until November 5. Fourteen states, including battleground state Minnesota, do not begin counting mail-in ballots until after polls close. The battleground state of Nevada allows all-mail elections; the state will count ballots that arrive within four days of Election Day as long as they are postmarked by November 5.
“I'm an optimist, so I think things will probably move a little faster than they would in an unusual year like 2020,” Fortier said. “Arizona has the most vote-by-mail votes in the nation. It'll probably take a little longer, but I think there's a good chance we'll know the results unless it's a very close call.”
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A Fox News poll from August gave Harris a one-point lead in Arizona. The Real Clear Politics average gives Trump a lead of just over one point.
“There's not going to be a lot of mail-in ballots or unexpected votes, so I think a lot of states are prepared for that and will be able to count them more quickly,” Fortier said. “If the vote count is extremely close, there will definitely be a recount. There could be disputes. And these things can take a very long time.”
