I got asked a question earlier this evening as to how the current 2021 VA election early vote/absentee data was shaping up in comparison to the 2020, so I did some quick processing and plotting of the Daily Absentee List (DAL) from just after the 2020 election (11-09-2020), and the current DAL as of today (10-21-2021).
The below graphs plot the APP_STATUS=”Approved” entries in the DAL, broken out by BALLOT_STATUS and plotted vs their BALLOT_RECEIPT_DATE. One major difference is that we haven’t had any Federal Write-In Absentee Ballots (FWAB) entered into the DAL in 2021 yet that have a valid BALLOT_RECEIPT_DATE, and the 2020 FWAB counts had a very different general curve than the other ballots. We also had a little less than 1000 ballots entered “On Machine” before early voting started in 2020. We see ballots issued earlier in the year for 2021, but no major “On Machine” counts. Note these graphs are logarithmic in the y-axis for easier viewing, and I had to discard 660 entries for 2020 and 11 entries for 2021 because the BALLOT_RECEIPT_DATE was invalid.
