More Than 53 Million Americans Voted Before Election Day, Already Above the 2022 Midterm Pace, With Texas Past 7 Million

More than 53 million Americans had cast ballots in the 2026 midterm elections by Sunday morning, two days before Election Day, according to the University of Florida Election Lab's tracking as reported by Al Jazeera.

As of 6:56 a.m. Eastern time Sunday, 53.14 million of about 210 million registered voters had voted early, including 29 million in-person votes and 23 million mail ballots, Al Jazeera reported. In the 2022 midterms, 46 million people voted early. NBC News' early-vote tracker showed 54,834,584 mail and early in-person votes as of 6 a.m. Monday. Totals differ slightly among trackers because states report on different schedules.

Texas has recorded more than 7 million early votes, more than 1.5 million above its 2022 early vote, according to the University of Florida figures cited by Al Jazeera.

In South Carolina, which has open races for governor and U.S. Senate, early voting is up 83 percent from the same point in 2022, according to an Associated Press analysis cited by Al Jazeera. In Kansas, where Republican Sen. Roger Marshall faces Democrat Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister, early voting is up 34 percent, about 83,000 more ballots than four years ago. In Maine, where Republican Sen. Susan Collins faces Democratic former state Senate President Troy Jackson, early voting is up 44 percent, and Michigan has about 409,000 more early votes than at the same point in 2022, a 32 percent increase, according to the AP figures.

Massachusetts is part of the surge. The Secretary of the Commonwealth's office reported 1,070,364 ballots cast as of 4 p.m. Oct. 30, or 20.5 percent of registered voters, including 733,678 returned mail ballots and 336,686 in-person early votes, South Coast 360 reported.

Party registration and what it does and does not show

In states that report party registration, more than 11 million registered Democrats had voted early, compared with about 8 million registered Republicans, according to the University of Florida analysis cited by Al Jazeera. Party registration of early voters is not a vote count. Registered voters can and do cross party lines, many early voters are unaffiliated, and Republicans in recent cycles have been more likely to vote on Election Day.

National polls cited by Al Jazeera showed Democrats at 51.5 percent and Republicans at 43.1 percent on the generic congressional ballot. Polls measure voter intent at a point in time and carry margins of error.

The number of states offering in-person voting before Election Day has grown from 24 in 2000 to 47 in 2026, plus Washington, D.C., according to Al Jazeera. Eight states, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington, plus the District, conduct elections entirely by mail.

The University of Maryland's Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement has said voters choose early voting for convenience, because campaigns mobilize them to, or because of anxiety and a wish to "get it over with," Al Jazeera reported.

The surge in mail voting comes after a year of litigation over it. In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to design new mail-ballot envelopes with special barcodes, which would have required states to adopt a uniform envelope style on a short timeline, Al Jazeera reported. Democrats and advocacy groups challenged the order in several courts, and last month the Supreme Court rejected Trump's bid to put the mail-voting restrictions in place before this month's elections, according to the report.

Trump has repeatedly questioned the security of mail voting, citing claims of widespread fraud that have been debunked, while voting by mail himself, Al Jazeera noted.

Polls open Tuesday in every state, with closing times that vary by state and time zone. In states that allow ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive later, final counts can take days. Massachusetts counts mail ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 that arrive by 5 p.m. on Nov. 6.

The Justice Department plans to send about 1,000 election monitors to polling places in all 50 states, including Boston and Lowell, in what Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called the largest such effort in the department's history, WBUR reported.

Early vote totals will continue to rise Monday in states that allow in-person voting through the day before the election. The records they set describe turnout, not results.