More than 5.6 million people have already voted in the presidential election, a wide surge compared to the 75,000 votes from early voting at this point in the 2016 election.

The aggregated data for in-person and mail-in vote totals come from the United States Elections Project’s efforts to track early voting records. The data reported that Florida and Virginia lead in terms of early voting, at roughly 948,000 and 770,000 votes from each state, respectively.

“We’ve never seen this many people voting so far ahead of an election,” Michael McDonald of the University of Florida, who leads the project, told Reuters. “People cast their ballots when they make up their minds, and we know that many people made up their minds long ago and already have a judgment about Trump.”

For this election season, more voters are participating in early voting to reduce the risk of contracting the coronavirus at a congested polling site, as well as because of the convenient laws implemented by several states to expand early voting methods.

In the 2016 presidential election, more than 138 million ballots were counted.

Although the increases in early voting are eye-popping, John Fortier, the director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Project, said that there’s been a long history of people voting by mail, with the numbers swelling each year.

“Even if none of this had happened, we probably would have expected another rise in that direction,” Fortier said, referring to the coronavirus pandemic. Fortier added, however, that there will be a “significant increase in voting by mail” in 2020 compared to past years.

With less than four weeks until Election Day, the project reported that 1.2 million Democrats have returned mail-in ballots, while Republicans have returned roughly 508,000 ballots, as indicated by states that provide voter partisan data.

But just because Democrats have a mail-in ballot voting advantage as of Wednesday, it doesn’t mean that the party has an overall voting lead. Republicans could be “more dominant in the later parts” of voting, like at the polls on Nov. 3, so deeply examining the current mail-in ballots by party can be a “little bit dangerous,” Fortier said.

Mail-in ballots have surfaced some concerns among voters over whether they’ll be counted on or by Election Day, as it’s left Americans wondering if the next president won’t be named by election night. With possibilities of postal delays, problems with polling officials or people mailing in a ballot later than anticipated, the results could be reported days after the election. But that’ll only happen in the event that the race to land a spot in the Oval Office is tight, according to Fortier.

Fortier noted that “there’s a good chance” the country will know who will be the next president by election night if there is a wide voter gap or clear indication of a winner.

“There’s a real difference between knowing exactly what the final national vote count is and really knowing who the winner of the election is. There’s a good chance that we will know the winner of the election by election night if the margins are not very tight,” he said. “Yes, there will be some states that are harder to read . . . and there will be caution about calling them on election night, but it could be that the mix of the other states that you know are clear and there’s a winner.”

Rachel Bucchino is a reporter at the National Interest. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report and The Hill. 

Image: Reuters