The Early Voting Information Center
We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Center for American Progress and a number of state and local elections offices.
The Early Voting Information Center is proud to have co-hosted the inaugural Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference in July of 2017. More information can be found on the conference website.
Professor Gronke's academic credentials--including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers--can be found at his personal Reed web page.
- Research Analyst: Brian Hamel, PhD student, UCLA Dept. of Political Science.
- Assistant: Laura Swann, Reed College ('19).
- Research Coordinator: Mia Leung, Reed College ('19).
Interesting things to report from Georgia. First, the early voting turnout has already broken previous records. In 2004, around 20% of the 3.3 million voters cast their ballots early. As of today, the state reports that 1,206,981 ballots have already been cast in this election–22% of Georgia’s registered voters. Advance voting is open in the state until Friday; I predict significant further increases.
The state also provides a limited racial breakdown for early voters. The graphs below show slightly different things. On the left, a straight breakdown of the number of votes cast by racial group. Nothing looks too surprising about this graph–white voters are overwhelmingly the dominant racial group in state.
The graph on the right, however, shows the percentage of votes cast against registered voters within each racial group. This, again, yields the interesting finding that African-Americans are voting early at higher rates that whites, in proportion to their group size. The trend continues.
Georgia is unexpectedly close this year, and it remains to be seen how good the pollsters’ “likely voter” models are.