With three days remaining in early voting in North Carolina, the statistics from the State Board of Elections show a nearly 30% turnout rate at this point. As of 10:00pm EST 10/29, of the state's 6,224,230 registered voters, votes had been cast by 1,847,564 (29.68%). A deeper breakdown of the numbers inside the fold...
I'm not sure exactly how accurate this is, because my wife and I both voted today, and our application for absentee ballots don't show up yet on the state election website. So there may be a one-day or so lag in the stats, but I can't be sure since I don't know where in the process the stats are aggregated from.
Some additional numbers:
One-stop (early) votes: 1,690,195 (91.5%)
"Civilian" (traditional absentee) votes: 148,704 (8%)
Military absentee votes: 5,848 (less than 1%)
Overseas absentee votes: 2,817 (less than 1%)
I'll look at both the one-stop votes and the traditional absentee votes for reasons I'll discuss in a minute.
First off, the early in-person voting:
Total: 1,690,195
Female: 953,735 (56.4%)
Male: 722,173 (42.7%)
Registered Democrats: 939,331 (55.6%)
Registered Republicans: 453,413 (26.8%)
Independents/Unaffiliated: 296,541 (17.5%)
White: 1,132,847 (67%)
Black: 489,307 (28.9%)
Analysis: Good female turnout, but the guys aren't absent so far. Dems have greater than a 2-1 turnout advantage so far, which is a good sign. Less indies than I had expected, but still a robust turnout given their numbers in the state. Caucasians are turning out only slightly below their percentage of the electorate (~68%). African-Americans have a significant turnout above their demographics (almost 29% vs. 21% of the electorate). Not sure where the matching decrease is...maybe low early turnout among Hispanics or Asians, or the numbers are being thrown off by people listing "two or more races" or "other" (I know several people of Caucasian descent who register as Other).
Now, to the traditional absentee mail-in ballot, the traditional GOTV edge for Republicans in NC (presumably from rural areas and among the elderly).
Total: 148,704
Female: 85,402 (57.4%)
Male: 62,439 (42%)
Registered Democrats: 41,457 (27.9%)
Registered Republicans: 82,617 (55.6%)
Independents/Unaffiliated: 24,571 (16.5%)
White: 135,683 (91.2%)
Black: 8900 (6%)
Analysis: Pretty much speaks for itself. Almost purely a white utilization, and a 2-1 advantage for the Republicans. The silver lining is that the one-stop early voting is absolutely crushing the mail-in ballots as a percentage of the total, and I would imagine will continue to.
Statistics aside, when I went to the early voting site in Cary tonight at about 6:30, I was told the wait was about 75 minutes. (which is almost exactly what it turned out to be). I was voter #17,195 on one of the two ballot machines, which combined showed a little over 31,500 people have voted at just this one location in Wake County alone. For someone used to being voter 114 or so, it was a jaw-dropping and humbling moment. I sort of wish I had brought a camera with me to take a picture of my ballot. In a weird way, I wanted to hold on to the ballot because I could tangibly feel how important and pregnant with possibility that ballot was. It was like holding a tiny piece of history, my own shard of the Berlin Wall.