• More than 46 million Americans had already voted in the 2024 election as of Tuesday morning, according to NBC News’ tracker, representing about a quarter of the electorate.
• Some states, like North Carolina and Georgia, reported their early voter turnout set records this election cycle.
• While early voting data can provide useful signs of potential trends and help gauge voter enthusiasm, it is not a predictive model for Election Day results.

More than 46 million Americans have set their sights ballot papers in the 2024 election from Tuesday morning, according to NBC News‘ tracker, representing more than a quarter of the expected electorate.

The two candidates, vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trumpencouraged voters to go to the polls as soon as possible.

With a week to go before the Nov. 5 election, early voting is underway in all seven battleground states, as well as dozens more. Reports of hours-long queues outside polling stations have already emerged on social media, as voters flood the limited number of municipal spaces set up to accommodate early voting.

While millions of Americans waited in line to vote in person, 20 million more sent in their ballots by mail. The 46.5 million early votes are split almost evenly between in-person and mail-in ballots, according to the University of Florida Elections Laboratory.

Some states, such as the main presidential battlegrounds of North Carolina And Georgiareported that their early voter turnout set records this election cycle.

In North Carolina, 353,166 ballots were accepted on the first day of early voting on Oct. 17, breaking the record for the first day of 2020, according to preliminary data from the State Board of Elections. As of Tuesday, more than 2.7 million votes had been cast statewide, according to NBC News.

Georgia also broke its first-day early voting record with approximately 310,000 ballots cast on October 15. As of Tuesday, just under 3 million ballots had been received.

These historic voter numbers test the limits of America’s early voting infrastructure, which is operating with only a fraction of the workers and polling places that will be open on Election Day.

Early voting is intended to provide Americans with more convenient alternatives to voting on Election Day. In some states, early voting also allows election officials to get a head start on processing or counting votes, to spread the workload of counting votes over several days.

Election and voting laws are enacted by individual states, not the federal government. This creates a patchwork of electoral operations across the country, each governed by its own rules.

Arizona, Michigan and Nevada, for example, are allowed to start counting their ballots before November 5. But in Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, counting may not begin until Election Day.

Early votes made up about two-thirds of the votes cast in the 2020 election, according to the Associated Press.

This massive total, more than 100 million votes, is largely explained by the unique impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on American civic life.

And while early voting data can provide useful signs of initial trends in the electorate and voter enthusiasm, it is not a predictive measure of Election Day results.