'12 Voting Well Under Way; Who's 'Winning' Not Clear
The general election may technically still be a little more than three weeks away, but voting is going on now.
Early in-person voting is well under way in key swing states like Ohio and Iowa, and absentee ballots are being cast in Florida and North Carolina. Key swing states like Ohio and Wisconsin don't register their voters by political party, so it is difficult to calculate who is "winning" the early vote in some battlegrounds- but in the ones where a breakdown is available, the results are mixed.
In Iowa, Democrats are dominating the early vote. The Secretary of State's office reports that 186,503 ballots have been received as of Oct. 10th- and those numbers trend heavily Democrats. 101,613 ballots are from registered Democrats while 50,032 are from registered Republicans.
In North Carolina, the opposite is true. 40,373 absentee ballots had been cast as of yesterday, with registered-Republican ballots outnumbering registered-Democrat ballots nearly two to one.
In Ohio, the Secretary of State's office reports that over 1 million absentee ballot applications to vote by mail have been received, and over 59,000 Ohioans have cast their ballots in person already. In Florida, more than 147,000 absentee ballots have been cast, the secretary of state's office announced yesterday. A party breakdown was not offered.
Absentee ballots go out next week in Colorado and Nevada-in 2008 more than 60 percent of the total vote in both of those states was cast early.