What the numbers say
Early votes cast, cumulative (in person + mail)
2022: VPAP daily totals; 2024/2026: EPEC daily Daily Absentee List metrics. Both built from the state elections office (ELECT) file. 2024 was a presidential year.
2026 vs 2024: in person vs mail
Cumulative early in-person ("on machine") and mail ballots returned. 2022 split not available by day.
Early votes per day, 2026
Change in cumulative total from each daily file.
This section is this dashboard's own geographic model of partisan lean, built by grouping Virginia's localities by their official 2024 presidential results; the estimate below also uses official 2025 results by vote method. Virginia has no party registration, so this is not a count of Democratic or Republican voters and not an official figure.
Partisan-lean proxy: where the early vote is coming from Our model (geography, not voter party)
Estimated lean of early ballots so far Our model · estimate
Share of early vote by locality lean Our model
Localities grouped by 2024 presidential margin (official ELECT results): Strong D = Harris +20 or more, Lean D = Harris +0–20, Lean R = Trump +0–20, Strong R = Trump +20 or more. 2022 by-locality numbers exist only as the final early + mail total, so the 2022 bar is a full-period comparison, not same-day.
Pace by locality lean Our model
Left: 2026 vs 2024 at the same days out (same source, same day). Right: 2026 so far as a share of each group's full 2022 early + mail vote (final official totals; no same-day 2022 locality data).
Largest localities Our model
Sources & caveats
- Official underlying data: Virginia Department of Elections (ELECT) Daily Absentee List. It's sold ($76 per election), not posted, so we use two sources built from it:
- 2024, 2026 daily: EPEC / Digital Poll Watchers DAL metrics, digitalpollwatchers.org/files/DALTracker/
- Locality lean: official 2024 presidential results by locality, ELECT, enr.elections.virginia.gov. 2022 locality early + mail totals: ELECT 2022 turnout by locality (final). 2024/2026 locality daily counts: EPEC DAL metrics by locality.
- 2022 daily (and 2026 cross-check): VPAP, Early Voting in Virginia, vpap.org/elections/early-voting
- Secondary sources. Both are built from the official ELECT file. The 2026 totals match within a few votes (EPEC 635,348 vs VPAP 635,329 for Oct 15).
- 2022 locality totals are noisy. They come from ELECT's final turnout table, and some localities sorted 2022 early ballots into categories differently (e.g. Albemarle shows only 5,732 early + mail votes, so 2026 is already "241%" of 2022 there). Group totals are less affected than single localities; read the "% of 2022" column with care.
- The lean groups are a geographic proxy, not voter party. A rising share from Strong-R localities means more early votes from places Trump won big, not necessarily more Republican voters. Large mixed localities (e.g. Prince William, Chesterfield) hold voters of both parties. No expected-margin estimate is shown, to avoid anything that looks like a vote count.
- Virginia has no party registration and doesn't collect race on registration, so there are no party or race charts.
- Counts are ballots "countable" so far: early in person ("on machine") plus mail ballots received and marked. A file pulled each morning is dated the previous day. The 2022 series is VPAP's daily total, with no in-person/mail split by day.
Law changes that affect comparisons
Rule changes between cycles can shift how (not just how many) people vote early. Keep these in mind when comparing to past years.
- 2020 · HB 1 / SB 111: no-excuse absentee voting, including 45 days of early in-person voting, began in 2020. In 2018 voters needed an excuse, so 2018 early voting (about 345,000 in total) isn't comparable day by day. HB 1 (2020)
- 2020-21: prepaid return postage, drop-off boxes, a permanent absentee list and pre-processing of mail ballots were added; mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received by noon on the third day after are counted. ELECT: early and absentee voting