More than 3 million North Carolinians have voted as of Wednesday morning, almost a million more than had cast ballots at this point in the 2020 election.
The Wednesday update showed that the state hit the 3-million-vote mark at noon on Tuesday, counting both absentee by-mail ballots and in-person early voting, according to the State Board of Elections (SBE) daily turnout reports.
As of Wednesday morning, 3.36 million North Carolinians have voted in total. That amounts to 43% of the state’s electorate of about 7.8 million registered voters. The vast majority of the votes — nearly 3.2 million — are from early voting. About 180,000 absentee ballots have been received as of Wednesday, the SBE said.
At this point in the 2020 election, about 3.6 million people had voted, counting both early voting and absentee ballots. In 2016, the total with a week to go until Election Day was 2.1 million votes cast, according to the SBE.
Republicans are turning out in slightly higher numbers than Democrats, with just under 1.15 million ballots filed. Democrats have cast about 42,000 fewer ballots through Wednesday. Almost the same number of unaffiliated voters have cast ballots, with 1.1 million received as of Wednesday.
North Carolina does not allow votes to be counted before polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 5. The SBE does count how many ballots are cast as they come in, the party affiliation of the voter, the voter’s race and their gender.
About 2.4 million White voters have cast ballots in North Carolina, along with 587,000 Black voters as of Wednesday. Voters who identify as another ethnicity have cast 394,000 votes.
In a state with a significant Hispanic immigrant population, only 82,000 ballots have been cast by people that identify as Hispanic or Latino, according to the SBE.
Women are outpacing men in early voting, with 1.7 million having voted already compared with 1.4 million for men.
