What Early Votes Show About the 2024 Elections

Hey, welcome to Crossroads. Folks, while the official numbers are not quite in yet for the elections, you know, we have to wait till November. Early voting is actually already coming in. It's happening in a lot of states. Now, many states are already opened up for early voting and actually a lot of votes are coming in. Data right now in around 780,000 votes is already available. And it could give us a picture of how Americans are deciding the next president. Now, some of the initial analysis is from the University of Florida's Election Lab. Let me show you what they're saying so far. This is their data. It says election statistics, total early votes, 787,004 people voted in person, voted so far, and noted that these are in-person early votes. And it's a 281,221 are mail-in ballots returned. So people going in are voting. People are also doing mail-in ballots. I'm sorry, the in-person is 281,000. The mail-in ballots returned so far is 505,783. Mail-in ballots requested, and this is the big one, because this shows how many people are gonna use mail-in ballots, presumably. 45,669,049. They've requested, again, over 45 million mail-in ballots so far. Now, this is last updated this morning, around 10.07 a.m. Eastern time. Now, so far, we're not really seeing which person people are voting for just yet, technically. The data we can go by, though, is just based on kind of party affiliation. We don't know for sure if these votes are Trump or if they're for Kamala, but we do know which party the votes are coming from. Now, so far, it looks like most early voting is being done by Democrats. Not all states show party affiliation votes. We only have data on around 212,251 so far on this. The data is from states that show party registration, which means the only ones we're getting this from so far are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Washington, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Idaho, Rhode Island, and South Dakota. So a small sample, presumably, right? Now, this is what it actually says about who's voting and which party they're from. So far, right, so far, Democrats are around 133,000 of them. That's 62.3%. Republicans are around 47,500. That's around 22.3%. And people who don't have a party or a minor party, like second, third-hand party, that's around 33,000 or around 15.4%. And so what we can say so far is that Democrats are the ones who are doing most of the early voting so far. Most of that is coming from Democrats. Now, it's important to note also where most of the data is coming from. The majority of early voting is coming from Virginia. Most of the, like we mentioned all these states, most of it is coming from Virginia. Virginia right now has around 347,000 early votes. New Jersey's another big one. They have around 90,000 votes. Wisconsin has about 87,000. Maryland has another 65,500. Minnesota, around 33,000. South Dakota, again, 12,500. And early voting in a lot of other states, outside of those, and again, if you look at it, Virginia is like the biggest by far, right? They're the biggest by a large margin. Outside of them, really a lot of areas are just voting maybe in the few thousands or maybe the several hundreds. Case in point, Georgia, they only have around 730 votes in so far from early voting. So right now it's fair to say that some states are seeing a whole lot more people using early voting than other states, even when it's available, even when it's fully there. Most of the votes also are people who are over 65 years old. That's about 57%. Next up is people aged 41 to 65. That's around 30%. People between the ages of 26 and 40 is only about 9.8%. And people 18 to 25 is 3.4%. Between men and women, it's actually close. It's actually very similar. Women are voting early at about 50%. Males at about 46.4%. Another 3.6% are unknown. But it should be noted on age and gender, voters, this information is only available from a few states also. And this is based on only about a 10th of the total number of votes. When it comes to race, only three states actually provide this data. So we don't really get a clear picture of it. We only get that from Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It does show about 66% of the votes are from non-Hispanic white voters, 7.6% from non-Hispanic black voters, 2.4% from Hispanic, 2.6% from Asian, 0.2% Native American, and about 21.3% is unknown or mixed race. But it's only based on around like 11,000 votes. So again, it's a pretty small sample size. The big numbers right now, right? In my opinion, what's gonna be probably the biggest factor with all this, the big numbers are the mail-in ballots. This is again, this suggests that mail-in voting is gonna be big again this year. You might remember back in 2020, mail-in voting and the ballot drop boxes, that was one of the bigger things that made people have some issues with the elections. That's gonna be really big this year. Now, remember, 2020 elections, more than 60% of eligible Americans voted. At least according to data, former President Donald Trump got over 74 million votes. President Biden got 81 million votes. As of now for the upcoming elections, there are more than 37 million mail-in ballots already requested. That's a good chunk of the votes, 37 million mail-in ballots already requested. Here's the data we have on this so far. Now it says this, Democrats have requested around 16,530,000 ballots, Republicans around 9,566,000. Now when it comes to again, people, part of third party candidates and people just don't register at all with the party, that's 11,822,000. Now, it's actually interesting because, again, Democrats are doing this more actually independence and people who are not registered with the party are voting a lot as well. We'll have to see where these kind of swing voters end up going. Various polling suggests though, about half of eligible voters in the United States are planning to vote again. If the numbers for that turn out the same as in 2020, when again, around half of eligible voters voted, that's going to be over 150 million. Now, this is interesting also, because what we could see, sorry, one sec. Now this is interesting also, the way it's kind of like panning out right now is what we could see is it seems we're on track to have about a third of the votes coming from mail-in ballots. And based on that data, you might remember that Republicans were a little more wary of it. One of the big points of early voting last time around, you might remember, it was very controversial among Republicans. Let me show you again, just a reminder of how that's gone. Basically, here's what happened. They changed a lot of the election laws back in 2020 because of COVID. They said we need to have social distancing, we need to make sure that people can't see the votes counted up close because you have to social distance, you have to keep your masks on, can't get too close to it. They even put up big cardboard things in the windows to protect themselves from that. You might remember all of that. What else did they do? They did universal mail-in ballots. They sent them out to every registered voter. They're cleaning the voting rolls in some areas, they're finding in some areas thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands, even in some areas much more than that. People were registered to vote who are not really there anymore or would not be eligible to vote. And so they're cleaning that up a bit. 2020, they just sent it out to everybody who was registered. Just everybody got a ballot. I remember in my house, for example, I got three ballots sent to me that weren't mine, just emphasizing what that looked like. What ended up happening, of course, though, is that early voting was big and Republicans mostly were opposed to it. Democrats were very strongly pushing it. A lot of Republicans did not like it. The result of that was that a lot of Republicans did not use it, they didn't trust it. Things are kind of changing now, though. While Republicans still seem to be relatively wary of it, you actually have Trump pushing it. For example, here's four. They say, Trump calls early voting, quote, stupid stuff, moments after urging supporters to vote early. And it sounds funny, but here's the context of that. Trump basically, again, representing the Republican side of this, is basically saying that they still don't seem to agree with early voting. They seem to believe that it shouldn't be allowed, but if they wanna change the rules of the game, you gotta play by the rules of the game. And that seems to be his stance with it. Again, Republicans didn't really use a lot of the, a lot of the new voting systems that were implemented in 2020. Democrats used them very fully. Republicans mostly tried to challenge them and did not use them. And so we could actually see this change quite a bit. Now, given that situation, there could also be some big changes of how things are done this year. Georgia, for example, Georgia's making headlines because Georgia's state election board, they passed a rule to have ballots counted by hand. Because again, there were some concerns around the systems that count the ballots for people. They wanna have it done by humans. Now they say this, this is NPR, September 20th. They say Republicans advanced the measure over the opposition of Georgia's Republican Secretary of State and Attorney General and dozens of local election officials who said the last minute change could cause delays and confusion on election night and the days that follow. I'll get my thoughts in a minute. They note the rule mandates the poll managers and two poll officers in each precinct each count the number of paper ballots in each ballot box to compare with the total generated by the ballot scanner. A number of local election officials testified against the hand counts, raising concerns that human error could easily result in discrepancies and notes that while the rule is about counting ballots, not individual contests, as some conservatives have called for in recent years across the country, election experts agree, they say. And they always do this, right? The experts all agree. They often don't agree unless you only interview experts of one viewpoint, but they say this regardless. Election experts agree that hand counts are far slower and less reliable than machine tabulation. I'd question which experts they chose to interview if they say they all agree on it because I know plenty who don't agree with it, but hey, that's modern journalism. But look, what's happening with that? The Democratic National Committee and Democratic Party of Georgia, they filed a lawsuit to block the rule from going into effect in the elections and the main narrative going around is that this caused delays in the counting of votes, right? Delays and discrepancies. Look, the issue is elections are already delayed because we keep having problems with a lot of the voting systems. Like how long was the election delayed last time because of some of the problems they had? Look at what happened in the Arizona elections where a lot of the machines just failed and people couldn't even cast their votes. You know, you had that problem. The other thing too is that when there's errors with a lot of the machines, like they can't read the things properly, what it does is it shoots it back to a human, a person, who's in charge of basically checking the box they believe the person voted for. The difference between that and having hand-counted ballots with, again, several layers of discrepancy where you have people watching it is that it's not just on that one person. There's a little more oversight and that's kind of the other argument to it. I should note as well, hand counts, even though you could say, hey, it's kind of slow, it's actually common in a lot of countries. It's not like you're gonna have every vote in the United States counted by a handful of people. This is why we have counties and why you have local offices that do it all for the local area. All that comes together and it gives the data for the whole country. I watched, for example, how this is done in Taiwan. I was personally really impressed by the way Taiwan did their elections. I went there for their elections, for example. And the way it looked was this. You had one person who took, everybody could go in. I'm not a Taiwanese citizen. I was able to go in and watch this myself as a non-citizen. And so everybody can go in and watch it and the average citizen is able to have that kind of assurance that things are being done fairly. And they take steps to make sure that you can see for yourself it's being done fairly. What does that look like? They pick up a vote, they show it to the people sitting down and they shout out the name of who they voted for. And then there's a person who echoes it and they jot it down on a board and everybody can see it. Everyone can see it. You have a handful of people going through this process and there's every single vote shown to people, every single vote double-checked, every single vote, again, presented for scrutiny and it's a very fast process. When I saw the way the elections are handled in Taiwan, I became a little concerned about the way we handle elections because it was nothing like that. Look, the reason you have standards like that is not for speed, right? The reason you have standards like that is for transparency. And ironically, in Taiwan, they wrapped up their elections faster than we do. Hand count ballots, the way they did it, it was more efficient, faster, and it was done within a few hours, faster than we have our elections in the United States. And so I would seriously question whether this is actually about speed or maybe something else, right? The problem we have in this country is that, look, a system of voting relies on people's faith in the integrity of the system. Transparency is one of the best ways to ensure people have faith in the system. If there's actually a concern in the United States right now that, hey, people are questioning the elections, what do you do? Well, do you double down on the things that make them question it or do you try to create additional forms of transparency to reassure them that we still have a democratic election system? And yes, we're a republic, but a republic is a democratic, it's representative democracy, right? The process of voting, you would still call a democratic process, not a republic process. The republican system, again, is representative democracy. You elect people to represent yourself in the democratic process. But look, in other news, there's an update on the case in New York City against Mayor Eric Adams. It's interesting, right now, he's accusing authorities of illegally leaking secret grand jury information to the media. 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For your peace of mind, we also offer a no fee buyback commitment, a low price guarantee, along with free shipping and free insurance. So don't wait, call the number on your screen today and secure your financial future. Welcome back. There's some new charges coming up in New York City right now. Mayor Eric Adams is being charged with bribery and fraud. And interestingly now, he's pushing back against some of this. Now, right now what's happening, again, he pled not guilty and he's suggesting the charges are politically motivated because he's been speaking out about the policies of mass migration. And now in a new motion filed just yesterday, Eric Adams, he's accusing federal authorities of leaking grand jury information. And if it sounds familiar, remember Donald Trump was making accusations against some of the authorities doing similar things to him. New York Post said this, Mayor Eric Adams accused the feds of illegally leaking secret grand jury information to the media and called on the Manhattan judge overseeing this criminal case to intervene in a new motion filed early Tuesday. And notes that one of the legal teams demanded a court hearing to probe supposed leaks they claim came from federal agents and prosecutors involved in the bombshell indictment against the first term Big Apple leader. And notes the defense pointed to a series of articles on the probe published by the New York Times between last November and last week as evidence that the feds were allegedly providing information to news outlets in violation of the law. And notes the New York Times stories cited unnamed sources and Adams legal team claims the information reported by the newspaper could have only come from federal authorities. Now, why is this big? Well, look, we'll have to see if this is true or not. This is an accusation. Again, innocent till proven guilty on both sides. But if true, it supports his claim that there's a political motive involved. It means that, you know, why would prosecutors leak information to a news outlet if not, again, to affect public opinion? And if this is about politics, well, what do you wanna do? You wanna affect public opinion. They wanna discredit the guy and push him out. The big issue with someone related to the prosecution leaking information to the press, right? The big legal issue is because it affects the opinions of potential members of the jury. Again, in the United States, we have a system of law where if you stand trial, the jury decides whether you're innocent or guilty. The judge determines what your sentence is, right? The judge kind of, you know, moderates the process, but the jury decides if you're guilty or not. If the jury comes into the case believing you're innocent already, or if they come in believing you're guilty already, it means they have a preformed notion that will impact the way they judge the case. And normally, you have to recuse yourself. Normally, the judge will actually question the members of the jury and ask them, have you been exposed to articles on this? If it's, again, in the news, do you have any relations to the individual? Is there anything involved with this that would affect your opinions or make it so you can't make a fair judgment? And if you can't make a fair judgment, you have to recuse yourself. You have to step back. The problem we have with a lot of legal cases these days is because they're so high profile, right? This was one of the arguments with Trump, for example. He was saying, look, how can I get a fair trial? Everybody in this area probably already has an opinion on me. And I'd say, look, folks, tell me honestly, do you know a single person? Think of your friends and family or anybody you know, your coworkers. Do you know anyone who does not have an opinion on Donald Trump? And if they were to, again, be in charge of deciding if Trump goes to prison or not, do you think they'd be able to keep their opinions out of that, right? This is the big problem we have. For Eric Adams, it's similar, right? And so his legal team now making this charge, they could argue that it will make it harder for him to get a fair trial. And they could argue as well if they can prove that the federal prosecutors were the ones who leaked the information, which is what their accusation is. We don't know if it's true or not, right? It's just an accusation. But if it is true, they could potentially get this thing thrown out. You call that fruit of the poisonous tree. If in the process of investigation, laws are violated, the case gets thrown out. Simple as that, even if you're guilty, actually. Now, in other news, something big happened yesterday. You probably saw it. There's the unfolding war around Israel. Israel has begun carrying out ground operations in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah, a big terror network. It also issued what appeared to be a threat of regime change to Iran, saying that maybe a regime change is coming sooner than later. It's not clear if they're saying that they're gonna start a color revolution or if they're gonna try to assassinate the supreme leader in Iran. They weren't really clear on it. They just said, hey, regime change is coming. Iran responded to that by launching its own attack. Yesterday, Iran fired around, right, 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. And Israel is now vowing to respond to that. We haven't seen it yet. There's some different rumors on this. Some suggest they might attack the oil fields in Iran. If they do that, that's gonna affect Russia and China as well, because where's that all going, right? They might even try, for example, leadership decapitation, something they've been doing already. It's not quite clear yet, but this is where things are at. Also, Iran has declared war as well. Now, Reuters said this. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that arch foe Iran would pay for its missile attack against Israel Tuesday, while Tehran said any retaliation would be met with vast destruction, raising fears of a wider war. They said Iran made a big mistake tonight and will pay for it. This is Netanyahu saying this at the outset of a political security meeting, according to a statement. They note that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps said that the assault was in retaliation for Israeli killings of militant leaders, they killed a lot of the leaders of Hezbollah, and aggression in Lebanon against the Iran-backed arm movement, Hezbollah and in Gaza. Now, it notes that Israel vowed consequences for the onslaught, and they said this. Quote, we will act. Iran will soon feel the consequences of their actions. The response will be painful. And that's Israel's UN Ambassador Danny Dannen telling this to reporters. The White House similarly promised severe consequences for Iran, and spokesperson Jake Sullivan told a Washington briefing that the US would work with Israel to make that the case. And so, it's not clear how the United States is going to be involved with this, but we're in it. We have been pulled into this now. Now, look, based on early reporting, the Iran attack, I mean, look, if you look at the videos, it looked horrific, right? 180 ballistic missiles. That massive attack only killed one person. Again, tragic, but still, you'd think that would be a lot more devastating. The only individual who was killed documented so far was actually a Palestinian. It was a Palestinian from Gaza who was in Jericho, and he wasn't even killed by an explosion. He was killed by falling debris from one of the missiles. The debris just fell on him. There's a video of it, but I'm not gonna show it. But look, alongside that attack, there was also a terrorist attack, and that attack killed six people. I think it's seven now in Tel Aviv. The big question now is what form the Israeli retaliation is gonna take. We're kind of waiting on this right now. Again, the United States is gonna be involved in that to some degree. We don't know what that will be. The United States was already involved with this recent attack, intercepting some of these missiles. This is where things are at. Now, meanwhile, in the United States, something else is happening right now. Port workers with the International Longshoremen's Association, they have officially begun their strike, and this could massively impact shipping. This could cost the US economy billions. I'll be talking about this, though, more only on EpicTV.com. So, folks, join us in EpicTV.com. Those of you on YouTube, Facebook, XRumble, come and join us. Link in the description, EpicTV.com. Not only will you get access to the rest of my show and the live Q&A, coming up soon also, but also to a lot of other great shows, our special reports, our documentaries, and click on the link below. Come and join us again, EpicTV.com. Before we jump, let me show you a quick trailer from my documentary, The Final War, which exposes the Chinese Communist Party's 100-year plot to defeat America, and actually talks about a lot of things now happening before they happened. I'll see you all for the rest of this episode only on EpicTV.com. The greatest threat facing the United States is the CCP. The Epic Times investigation team had studied the CCP for years, but what we uncovered was yielding evidence beyond our imagination. With Chairman Mao, with the prime minister, our talks have been characterized by frankness. The Clinton administration said, oh, don't worry about it. This will be a poison pill for China. 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