Election Day Is Sooner Than You Think

Election Day 2024 formally occurs on Tuesday, November 5. For federal elections, this date is set by federal law, but currently all states and most localities follow it for their own contests in presidential-election years. To hear Donald Trump tell it, all voting should occur on that date and only on that date and, with a few exceptions, should be conducted in person. And in 2020, Trump insisted that only votes counted by Election Night should matter (a principle his own team violated then and is planning to violate this year by making it very difficult to expeditiously count votes), providing his rationalization for claiming victory when a huge number of votes had not yet been counted.

But in reality, for many years the states have supplemented Election Day voting by “convenience voting.” This comes in two forms: mail ballots (some styled originally as “absentee ballots” with a recent move toward “no-excuse mail ballots” that anyone can access) and voting in person at precinct or county voting locations during specified “windows” before Election Day. To be clear, Republicans by and large supported all sorts of convenience voting until Trump began attacking voting by mail in 2020, and even he has grudgingly backed it this year. So from a practical point of view, Election Day 2024 will begin much earlier in most states and particularly in the seven battleground states most observers think will decide the presidential election. Here, a rundown of when voting actually starts in battleground states:

Team Trump has pitched many fits politically and in the courts about the 17 states that allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be received and counted later, claiming this practice illegally extends Election Day. But there’s only one battleground state — Nevada — that falls into this category. In any event, we have every reason to believe that if Trump loses, he will again try to extend Election Night with a slow count and a contested outcome.

But at the other end of the process, Election Day really begins on September 6, when North Carolina starts sending out mail ballots, and continues that same month with the dispatch of mail ballots in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. So votes will be “banked” for both major-party candidates long before many of the dramatic events of the Harris-Trump contest will unfold. That’s worth remembering when allegedly “game-changing” moments occur. They won’t affect votes already cast.