Early voting

The goals of early voting are usually to increase voter participation, relieve congestion at polling stations on election day, and avoid possible discrimination against people with work and travel schedules that may effectively prohibit them from getting to the polls during the hours provided in a single election day.

[1] In addition to convenience and increased participation, early voting has proven advantageous for the smooth functioning of elections.

More options to vote before Election Day provides more opportunities to identify and counteract problems including machine breakdown, cyberattack, human errors, or disinformation.

When voting is spread out over several days, election officials can detect issues earlier, mitigate challenges more easily, counter false claims, and offer a greater number of options to any voters who may be impacted.

Voters are able to cast a pre-poll vote for a number of reasons, including being away from the electorate, travelling, impending maternity, being unable to leave one's workplace, having religious beliefs that prevent attendance at a polling place, or being more than 8 km from a polling place.

[1] Applying this definition, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia offer early voting to all voters.

[1] Iceland, Portugal, Slovenia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia offer early voting to some voters.

"[1] Iceland, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg offer in-country postal voting to all voters.

[1] The Republic of Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovenia, and Lithuania offer in-country postal voting to some voters.

Additionally, Finnish voters who are unable to travel to advance polling stations due to mobility impairments or illness may cast advance ballots at home (election commissioners make house calls to receive votes from such person).

[1] Voting by mail was adopted in West Germany beginning in 1957, but was originally a method mostly used for those with a particular reason preventing them from casting an in-person ballot.

[13] The proportion of German voters casting postal ballots has steadily increased since the 1990 reunification of Germany, and the excuse requirement was eliminated in 2008.

[15] In the Republic of Ireland, it is traditional for voters on the remote coastal islands to vote on the day prior to the official date of the election.

[16] This aims to avoid the possibility that bad weather might impede the delivery of ballot boxes to the count center on the mainland.

By law, election day is set to a Monday in September in the year of the end of the current term.

No voter registration is needed, since everyone is generally registered with a home address, nor is there any requirement to tell the authorities that you intend to vote early.

But that year the Swedish postal service was changed from being a government agency to a state-owned limited company that wasn't directly government controlled, so the responsibility for providing early voting fell on the local municipalities, who have always been responsible for the regular voting stations.

For the first time, this system was used in the referendum on amendments to the constitution, which was held on 1 July 2020, but citizens had the opportunity to vote within a week before the main day.

"[27] Historically, voting by mail has been fairly rare in Canada; of the 18.4 million total votes in the 2019 Canadian election, slightly under 50,000 voters cast ballots by mail, with most of these ballots coming from Canadians living abroad.

For 16 years the percentage increased steadily—21% in 2004, 31% in 2008, 33% in 2012, and 40% in 2016—before jumping to 69% in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, then returning to the long-term trend with 50% in the 2022 midterm elections.

[2] As of 2024, 47 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands offer in-person voting before Election Day.

In these states, each eligible, registered voter is sent a ballot, which can either be returned by mail, or dropped off at designated site during the early voting period.

[31] Some states give discretion to local election officials (sometimes county clerks) to add certain days of early voting.

In November 2022, Connecticut voters approved a constitutional amendment authorizing the state legislature to enact early in-person voting.