Election officials in battleground states say that voter turnout is surging in what is projected to be one of the closest presidential elections in a generation. Despite the massive voter turnout, swing state officials say, there is no evidence of any significant fraud or cheating.
"The only talk about massive cheating has come from one of the candidates, Donald J. Trump," Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said Tuesday. Reports from the City of Brotherly Love suggest record-setting turnout. For his part, Donald Trump has targeted the area in a Truth Social meltdown Tuesday.
“A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” Trump wrote on his social media site.
Philly’s Republican City Commissioner 👇 https://t.co/LzqziZ7lSK
— Zachary Cohen (@ZcohenCNN) November 5, 2024
"There is no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation. We have invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day. If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath," Krasner pushed back against the former president.
While the Election Day crush has eased in some states like Michigan, where early voting has broken records, in other places, lines of voters were seen snaking out of polling places before they were even open. According to Michigan's voter dashboard, 1,214,449 people cast an early in-person ballot since Oct. 26, while 2,106,337 returned an absentee ballot by mail. "The citizens of Michigan voted overwhelmingly to give themselves the right to vote in person early for at least nine days before any statewide election," said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, after happily announcing that Michiganders are voting in "record numbers." ABC 7 local news reported that an early voting center in Romulus, Michigan ran out of "I Voted" stickers.
While Georgia also broke early voting numbers, poll workers are reporting that election day turnout is strong, with some lines starting immediately when polls opened at 7 a.m.
"We opened up with about 100 or so. It took a good hour and a half or so to slow down," Wes Daniel, the precinct manager at Chicopee Baptist Church near Gainesville, told WDUN. "We're at 316 at noon, so we are outdistancing anything this particular precinct has ever seen."
Lines of a hundred or more people formed before polls opened in Pennsylvania as well, according to videos in social media depicting what appears to be massive election day turnout. Unlike Michigan and Georgia, however, slightly fewer people (two million) voted early than in 2020.
That year, election officials encouraged people to vote early due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the effect was not uniform — Republicans and Donald Trump's campaign falsely claimed that early mail-in voting was a Democratic scheme to commit mass voter fraud and urged their supporters to vote in-person. While a raging disease is no longer a barrier to voting on election day and Republicans continue to spread stories of fraud, the latter have largely abandoned their rhetoric connecting it to any particular voting method and are even exhorting supporters to vote early. As a result, some states like Nevada have seen an uptick in registered Republicans mailing in their ballots.
Veteran Nevada political reporter Jon Ralston posted on election day morning that just under 1.1 million Nevadans voted early, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by 41,800 votes, or 3.9 percent. Vice President Kamala Harris would need to break strongly with independents, he said, predicting that the Democratic nominee would do just enough to win the state by 0.3 points. As of 10am Pacific Time, he posted that 57,000 people have voted in the Silver State on election day.
The early vote is more encouraging for Democrats in Pennsylvania, where registered Democrats hold a two-to-one advantage in returned mail-in ballots despite GOP ballot requests increasing by 100,000 since 2020. Election experts have cautioned against reading too much into early voting party registration, as it is not necessarily predictive of voters choosing a candidate from another party or how independents might split. In general, however, it can be a good indicator of enthusiasm surrounding a candidate by their own base, particularly at the top of the ticket.
Another good sign for Harris and Democrats is that women are outnumbering men in early voting in an election where polls indicate a widening of the gender gap, where women have typically been voting for Democratic candidates by a 10-15 point margin in recent cycles. According to the Georgia secretary of state's election data hub, 53.3% of early voting ballots were submitted by women, versus 46.5 by men. In North Carolina, where Trump is hoping to maintain a string of narrow GOP victories since 2012, women outnumber men in early voting 51.7 percent to 41.2 percent.
In the run-up to the election and on election day itself, state and federal officials have been fighting off attempts by foreign hackers, GOP activists and others to sow doubt and confusion in the election process. So far, those attempts do not appear to have had a substantial effect on people's motivation to vote.
