Early voting is officially underway in the swing state of Iowa. Early voters in Iowa may drop off their filled out absentee ballots that they received in the mail at any one of the 99 county clerk's offices or at any satellite voting location. Or they may simply vote in person at any of these polling locations if they didn't already get their ballot by mail.
According to the Secretary of State's office in Iowa, here is the breakdown of requested absentee ballots:
Dem 119,318
Rep 24,909
Ind 41,366
Oth 154
This translates to the following percentages:
Dem 64.24%
Rep 13.41%
Ind 22.27%
Oth negligible
And the Secretary of State reports that some absentee ballots have been returned. Here are the statistics on those:
Dem 2.472 (69.46%)
Rep 482 (13.54%)
Ind 605 (16.99%)
Oth None
So in terms of ballots returned, Independents are outpacing Republicans, while Democrats are crushing everyone else. Yes, this is an extremely small number of ballots, but I'll take encouraging signs wherever I can find them.
Here is a link: http://sos.iowa.gov/...