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That’s about 29.9 percent of the state’s 732,308 registered voters in the 2024 election.
That figure is also about 42 percent of the total turnout — with about 518,000 voters casting ballots — during the last presidential election in 2020.
But John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, a nonpartisan watchdog organization, told the Globe on Tuesday morning that the comparison between these two elections is not necessarily “apples to apples” because of the pandemic.
“I think this will be the first election that tells us what the long-term patterns are likely to look like,” Marion said.
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The 2020 election was Rhode Island’s first election cycle where early voting was offered the same way it is now, with in-person polling places in addition to voting by mail options, Marion said.
But during the pandemic four years ago, there was a heavy emphasis on using mail-in ballots, he said. (A state law passed in 2022 has since expanded mail-in voting by removing some previous requirements, such as the need for signatures from a notary or witnesses.)
“So this is the first presidential election where we’ve had, you know, really early voting in the state, and so we don’t have a lot of data to go off of,” he said.
“It seems to be very popular,”
Data shows 171,817 voters voted in person during the early voting period.
“I thought mail-in voting would be more popular because so many people did it in 2020,” Marion said. “I thought they might have had a positive experience and wanted to vote by mail again. But it seems like people want to vote in person, but a lot of them wanted to vote early, which is great.”
Sixty-four percent of registered voters turned out to vote in 2020
However, Marion said Tuesday morning that he did not expect Rhode Island to reach the same level this time.
“I think the pandemic-era election will probably be a high point historically because so many people voted by mail,” he said. “There was a real mobilization effort around mail-in voting in 2020 that is not happening this cycle.”
Christopher Gavin can be reached at [email protected].