No-excuse early voting up in Kentucky over 2022 levels

Before polls open on Election Day, more than 300,000 Kentuckians have already cast their votes.

According to data from Secretary of State Michael Adams’ office, more voters took advantage of no-excuse, in-person absentee voting — often referred to as ‘early voting’ — over a three day period this November compared to 2022.

But the data also show that the use of mail-in ballots and excused in-person voting is down from 2022 levels, meaning overall absentee voting is lower in 2023.

Registered Democrats hold the advantage for no excuse in-person early voting, with 133,169 ballots cast to 112,398 from Republicans. That figure tipped in Democrats favor compared to 2022, where a slight majority of no excuse in-person early voters were registered Republicans.

With mail-in voting and excused in-person voting take into account, nearly 161,000 registered Democrats voted early compared to about 131,000 registered Republicans.

That’s a much higher gap than in 2022, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by about 8,000 in the same metric.

In 2022 Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, cruised to a 24-point victory over Democratic candidate Charles Booker, while Democrats took heart in the statewide near-5 point defeat of the anti-abortion Amendment 2.

This year’s election is the first Kentucky governor’s race with expanded access to early voting. As such, no comparison data for the 2019 election, where Beshear barely defeated former GOP governor Matt Bevin, exists.

The contest between incumbent Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear and GOP challenger Attorney General Daniel Cameron has become the most expensive and closely watched state-level race in the nation this year.

Adams said he expects overall turnout this election will be about 42%.

Over three days of no-excuse early voting, 7,306 more people voted this year than in 2022 — 260,324 in 2023 to 253,018 for the same period last year.