US Early Voting Crosses 40Mln Mark, Over Six Times 2016's Pace

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd October, 2020) Forty million US voters have already cast their ballots in the presidential election in what administrators describe as an unprecedented surge of early voting, Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub told reporters on Wednesday.

"We have already seen 40 million people vote already in this election even though we are still almost two weeks out for the actual Election Day," Weintraub said during a webinar.

The US Elections Project reported that 41.5 million voters have cast ballots as of Wednesday - 29.6 million by mail and 11.8 million in person, this is over six times greater than the pace in 2016. The number represents a jump of 10 million from just two days ago.

The figure is a combination of mail-in and in-person voting. She admitted that as a result of a massive early turnout the outcome of the standoff between the Republic incumbent Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden may not be clear on election night.

"It's quite possible that we will not know the results on election night.

There is nothing wrong with that, that just means that our election administrators are doing their job and they are trying to accurately count every single vote, and that's what we want them to do," Weintraub said.

The 2020 elections may also set records of campaign financing which is projected to reach $11 billion compared to $6.5 billion in 2016.

"We are busting through all sorts of records in terms of fundraising this year. It's really phenomenal... We have already passed $6.5 billion that was spent in the 2016 election," she said. It's a cumulative estimate of all money raised and spent on all 2020 election campaigns, starting from primaries, with both presidential candidates accounting for $3.5 billion.

Weintraub didn't have data to share on possible foreign funding, but singled out possible disinformation efforts by overseas actors as the Primary threat. The latest warning administrators received from the intelligence community alleges that Russia might falsely claim hacking election data bases to undermine voters' trust in the returns, she said.