These Charlotte-area counties helped NC set records on first day of early voting

Turnout in the Charlotte area helped propel North Carolina to a record-setting first day of early voting in the 2024 general election.

The State Board of Elections reported that 353,166 people voted in-person Thursday in the Tar Heel State, surpassing the record set in 2020 by about 4,500 votes.

Multiple counties in the Charlotte region set records too.

Gaston County reported 7,132 ballots cast Thursday, breaking the previous record of 6,723 early votes on a single day in 2020, county election director Adam Ragan said. Union County also broke its single-day record of 7,541 votes in 2020 after voters cast 8,396 ballots Thursday, according to county data.

Other counties in the region didn’t break records but came close to 2020 levels.

Mecklenburg County voters cast 29,688 ballots Thursday , short of breaking the single-day early vote record of 35,195 set in 2020 . But that figure was up from 3,747 votes on the first day every early voting site was open during the 2023 general election and 10,971 votes on the first day of early voting in October 2022, according to county data.

The Democrat-heavy county is known for lackluster turnout compared to other parts of the state — something party activists hope to address this year to help boost their candidate locally and statewide.

Cabarrus County also “didn’t quite hit 2020’s numbers,” county election director Carol Soles said. The county reported 5,690 ballots cast Thursday, down from a peak of 6,191 on a single day in 2020.

In Iredell County, 6,373 people voted early Thursday. And 4,268 people cast ballots in Lincoln County. Neither county’s boards of elections immediately confirmed whether those were records.

Turnout so far has been more evenly distributed among political parties than in past elections.

Democrats accounted for about half of first day early vote in North Carolina in 2020 compared to 21% by Republicans, The News & Observer reported. But through Thursday, Democrats had cast 36% of all ballots, to 33% by Republicans and 20% by unaffiliated voters.

But those statistics aren’t indicative of who will win or lost come Election Day, political scientists Michael Bitzer and Chris Cooper say.

“There is often a tendency to try to use patterns in early voting data as an early sign of who might win or lose the election. Please don’t do this,” they wrote in a post for their Old North State Politics blog . “I mean, you could, but it would be like bringing a fishing pole to a home run derby — it’s just the wrong tool for the job.”