Contra Costa County reports long lines of early in-person voters

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - Contra Costa County was among the Bay Area counties reporting high turnout on Friday for in-person voting ahead of Election Day. 

"We’ve seen extraordinary turnout," said Contra Costa County Clerk, Kristin Connelly. "My staff, who have been around years and years and years, they have not seen anything like this."

Still, statewide and across the nation, the combined number of voters taking part in early in-person voting and mail-in-voting is down from 20-20. 

"Sometimes when you’re comparing back to 2020, which was kind of a unicorn of an election, people want to infer that the change in voting patterns is all because of enthusiasm, but in many, many cases it’s because of a change in the election mechanics," said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data, Inc. "There were a lot of laws instituted at that time for people to be able to vote by mail. In California, we made those laws permanent. But in other states, they didn’t necessarily make those same laws permanent, or they’ve changed the laws since."

In terms of just in-person early voting, Georgia and North Carolina are reporting record turnout. 

Mitchell has also been monitoring the mail-in ballot numbers in California. 

"We’re seeing a lot of the same patterns. The early vote is older, it’s whiter. Republicans overperform a little bit in the early vote relative to Democrats. Independents, they really lag in terms of their turnout."

So far, 35% of registered Republican mail-in voters have returned their ballots in the state, compared to 31% of Democrats. In total, that equates to more than 3.2 million Democrats who have mailed in their ballots, compared to more than 1.9 million Republicans.