The amount of early votes cast in the 2020 presidential election doubled when compared to numbers from 2016, with 94 million Americans having already voted before Election Day. That number reached more than 100 million as citizens went to the polls on Nov. 3.
Incredibly, that’s equivalent to three quarters of all the ballots counted in the 2016 presidential election. The ongoing pandemic is the largest cause of this shift in individual voting plans, with many opting to skip in-person in voting in favor of a socially distanced method. This factor contributed to the longer wait than usual—compared to some recent elections, anyway—for a winner to be declared, as many early votes were of the mail-in variety, and those are often more difficult for election officials to process.
