NEW ORLEANS — Nearly one third of Louisiana voters casted their ballots during the early voting period for the 2024 presidential election. According to data from the Sectary of States Office, just over 960,000 people voted early. On the last day of early voting, the state broke a record single day in person voting with just over 103,000 people voting on Tuesday.
Brandon Davis, a Political Science professor at Tulane University, said, "People are very cognizant of this election, and the fact that they're voting early means that they made their decisions early."
Davis said people are clearly also trying to avoid the long lines we typically see on election day for presidential elections.
With election day less than a week away, on Nov. 5, Davis said it is important to know that we might not know the winner of the presidential race until days after the election because of how most states process mail-in and absentee ballots.
"The main reason is that most states don't start counting absentee and mail-in ballots until the election day. So, when you don't count absentee ballots, and you don't count mail-in ballots, and you don't count early voting ballots until the day of the election, then that slows down the counting process within a state which slows down the certification process, which drags it out over could be a period of days," he said.
Davis pointed out, whose ballots wouldn't have any major impacts for traditionally red or blue states.
He said, "For the most part, the absentee ballots have not been a big turning point in elections. They usually simply mirror what's already in the electorate, and so you're just getting another small subset of the aggregate electorate.
However, it is possible to impact the electorate in a swing state according to Davis.
"That might be a problem where you have absentee ballots, push or pull the entire electorate one way in some of the swing states in Georgia when there's only, you know about 12,000 ballots, you can get 12,000 absentee ballots for sure," he said.
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