I know that I promised myself not to pay too much attention to the election, because as someone (Sondheim) once wrote, “If you have no expectations, You can never have a disappointment.” 

But this country has such a damned long election cycle, and I’m such an impatient kind of guy, I can’t seem to help myself.

Anyway, it turns that there’s a web site that tracks the early voting, at least for those states that see fit to report it.

Here’s the page for the 2026 results, which gets updated daily.

There are some interesting things to see there.

As of Oct 7, 2026 @ 8:09am Eastern Time there had been a total of 1,722,234 early votes cast. Of these 326,956 were in person votes, while 1,395,278 were mail ballots returned out of a total 52,632,468 mail ballots requested.

They also have a breakdown by state, so naturally I checked Pennsylvania.

So far there were 165,659 early votes, all of them mail ballots returned, of course, out of a total 1,066,900 mail ballots requested.

Now Pennsylvania is a swing state, but 74.7% of the votes so far are from voters registered as Democrats.

There’s also a breakdown by age that shows most of the early voters are over 65.

But wait! There’s more. There’s even a breakdown by county. 

Not surprisingly, the largest number of voters are from Philadelphia, 41,636, with the overwhelming majority of them being Democrats. Presumably my ballot is being counted in there somewhere.

I also checked Lebanon County, as that’s where I’m originally from, and there are 95 votes from there so far with 51 of them being from Democratic voters. Hmmph. I didn’t realize there were that many Democrats in Lebanon County!

Even York County, the home of Dover where that notorious Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial took place over the teaching of so-called “intelligent” design, has 33 voters, 25 of whom are Democrats.

I sense a trend.

But keep in mind that Democrats do tend to use mail-in voting more than Republicans for a variety of reasons.

Back to the total national vote by party registration, or at least for those states that report it. Not all states have voters register by party.

It still seems that the Democrats are well ahead of that other party.

I hope it continues.