Early Voting Final: 690,526 New Yorkers Voted Early in the City, 1,965,043 Across the State — Up Nearly 70 Percent on 2022
The nine-day early count is finished and it is a surge: Brooklyn led the boroughs with 219,536 check-ins, the statewide total jumped from 1.18 million four years ago to 1.97 million, and both parties are claiming the numbers as theirs.
New York's early vote is final, and it is far bigger than the last midterm's. Across the state, 1,965,043 people voted during the nine days of early voting from Oct. 24 through Nov. 1 — up from 1,178,676 in 2022, an increase of nearly 70 percent in the unofficial tally the State Board of Elections released Monday, the New York Post reported.
New York City's share of that surge was 690,526 early votes, up 60 percent from the city's 432,634 in 2022. Brooklyn cast the most of any borough with 219,536 check-ins, followed by Manhattan with 188,434, Queens with 162,914, the Bronx with 67,630 and Staten Island with 52,012, according to the city Board of Elections' unofficial counts. In all, the early check-ins equal about 13.9 percent of the city's active registered voters — a total that finished roughly 45,000 behind last year's mayoral early vote and well short of the 1,089,328 who voted early in the 2024 presidential election.
The growth was not only a city story. Early voting in the suburbs and rural upstate counties rose 70 percent, from 746,042 to 1,274,717, and in the North Country district being vacated by Rep. Elise Stefanik it more than doubled in four counties — Clinton, Essex, Oneida and St. Lawrence — while Rockland County, in the contested lower Hudson Valley district, rose 81 percent to 44,184. WAMC, working from the same state figures, put voters outside New York City and Long Island at about 46 percent of this year's early turnout.
Both parties read the surge as their own. 'It looks promising for the Democrats. I'd rather be us than them,' state Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs told the Post. State Republican Chairman Ed Cox answered that his party had been urging early voting and that 'Republicans have been coming out in great numbers.' The desk notes what the numbers themselves can and cannot say: an early-vote total records who has already voted, not how they voted, and the remaining question — who shows up Tuesday — is the one Election Day answers.
Polls open at 6 a.m. Tuesday and close at 9 p.m., with the governorship, attorney general, comptroller, every congressional seat in the state and five proposed City Charter amendments on New York City ballots. The early voters have banked their say; Tuesday belongs to everyone else.
