What an amazing year for early voting.  This in from my good friend Michael McDonald.  While I “predicted” this six months ago, those in the know (Tova?  Michael?) can tell you that the “one third” estimate was out on a limb.  Looks like that limb just got a lot thicker.

Anyone ready to make a 2012 call?  Will we hit half of all ballots?

Merry Christmas: I am willing to concede the bottle of scotch.  Joe Holland sent me the California numbers, and while there are 1.1 million ballots that were dropped off on election day, he raised the total number of mail ballots to 6.2 million (the AP is reporting 5.7 million).  This pushes the early vote percentage to approximately 33% if you count all mail ballots as early votes and somewhere under 32% if you exclude mail ballots dropped off at the polls.