More Than 50 Million Americans Have Already Voted — and Florida Cast More Than 5 Million of Those Ballots
The national early vote passed 50 million before the weekend was over, a midterm surge driven by close races for Congress — with Florida's 5.15 million ballots making the state one of the biggest pieces of it.
The 2026 midterm election is already one of the biggest early-voting elections on record. More than 50.5 million early votes had been recorded across the United States as of the morning of Saturday, October 31, according to a University of Florida analysis reported by The Guardian — millions more than at the same point in the previous midterm cycle, in a year when close races will decide which party controls Congress.
Florida is a major share of that total. This station reported Saturday night that 5,152,684 ballots had been cast in Florida through October 31 — early in-person votes and returned mail ballots combined — with Lee County accounting for 210,874 of them through October 30.
What remains is Election Day itself. Lee County's early voting sites closed Saturday; on Tuesday, November 3, voters cast ballots at their assigned precincts from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and any mail ballot must reach the Lee County Supervisor of Elections by 7 p.m. that day to count. Registration is not a vote, and ballots remain sealed until counting under Florida law.
