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The 2016 early voter analysis focused on seven battleground states with sufficient early vote
data for inclusion: Iowa, Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.
Many states provide alternative methods of voting other than visiting ones polling place on
Election Day; these methods include, but are not limited to, mail-in absentee voting, no excuse
absentee voting, in-person no excuse absentee voting and/or early in-person voting. Some
states utilize a variety of these methods while others are more restrictive.
For the purposes of this analysis, early voting refers to any type of voting that occurs before
Election Dayabsentee, mail or in-person early voting. To obtain updated records of early
voters on a timely basis, TargetSmart rapidly updates their data files as soon as Secretaries of
State and State Election Boards make this data available. This information is then used by the
NBC News Data Analytics Lab for independent analysis.
For analysis of historical 2012 data, TargetSmart provided the NBC News Data Analytics Lab
with historic voting snapshots in order to examine the 2012 electorate as well the vote
histories of 2016 voters and other registered persons.
The partisan breakdown of early voters relied on two different sources. In Florida, Iowa and
North Carolina, registration applications ask voters to affiliate with a particular political party
when they sign up to register. In some states like Georgia, Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin,
partisan information is either not collected as part of ones registration or is unavailable. In
these states, a model-based estimate of a voters party affiliation was created independently by
TargetSmart and utilized in the analysis instead.
Overall, the partisan analysis grouped early voters into three categories: Democrat, Republican
and Other. Democrats and Republicans refer to early voters who are explicitly affiliated as
Democrats or Republicans on their registration records.
In Florida, Other includes any voter listed as Green, Independent, Libertarian, No Party or
Other. In Iowa, those who were listed as Unaffiliated or Other were combined into Other. In
North Carolina, this category combines Libertarian and Unaffiliated voters.
In Georgia, Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin, where TargetSmarts modeled partisan scores
were used, voters were placed into three categories: Republican, Democrat and Other.
Secretaries of State and State Board of Elections update and make available early voting
records in varying frequencies. In every state included in this analysis, the data is current as of
October 11, 2016.