Early voting in North Carolina (2020 vs 2016)

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Here in the United States, we have our general election (where we elect the president) every four years - and 2020 happens to be one of those election years. This time we seem to have a lot more people voting early. I can't tell you the reason they're voting early (perhaps because of covid-19? perhaps because of this year's political climate?) ... but I can show you a graph of the numbers!

I downloaded the raw data (showing each individual voter who voted early in NC), extracted the zip file, imported the csv into SAS, used SQL to summarize the data, and then a data step to calculate the cumulative totals. I then plotted both the 2016 and 2020 cumulative totals on the same graph, with the x-axis showing the number of days before the election (aligning the two lines on the day early in-person voting started).

And here's the graph:

And the big question - Will the 2020 numbers stay this far ahead of the 2016 numbers? Or will the two curves eventually converge? Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on that! (be sure to keep the comments civil, with no "partisan politics"!) 馃檪


Coding Details

For those of you who are data-meisters (and in particular SAS programmers), below are some technical details about the code I used to create the graph. And here's a link to the SAS code, and the HTML version of the output (with the live links to the data in the footnotes).

  • I got the data from the NC State Board of Elections - here are links to the 2016 and 2020 data.
  • Once I downloaded the zip, and extracted the csv, I used Proc Import with dbms=csv to read the data into SAS.
  • 聽I used Proc SQL's count() function to calculate the number of votes for each day, and a data step to calculate the cumulative number of votes.
  • Proc SGplot allowed me to overlay the two lines.
  • I used annotated text for the footnotes(so I could embed links to the data sources in the HTML output.
  • I used series plots for the lines, and the 'markers' option to add markers at each data point along the line. I think the markers give a good visual cue as to how fast the data is increasing (the farther apart, the faster the increase).
  • Rather than using a legend, I use the 'curvelabel' option to label each line with the year.
  • And I use the 'reverse' option on the xaxis, so the minimum "days before election" is on the right side of the graph.

Here's a graph, labeled to show where some of the things I mentioned above appear on the graph:

 

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About Author

Robert Allison

The Graph Guy!

Robert has worked at SAS for over a quarter century, and his specialty is customizing graphs and maps - adding those little extra touches that help them answer your questions at a glance. His educational background is in Computer Science, and he holds a BS, MS, and PhD from NC State University.

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9 Comments

  1. I definitely think the numbers for 2020 will stay ahead of 2016. I know people that have never voted before who are voting in this election. So different too with so many absentee ballots and early voting. Thanks for your graphs!

  2. Taukir Hussain on

    Please update the graph sometime in November so that we can see the final outcome. Thanks for your post!

  3. It is great that you provide SAS code with your data sources. I would like to use your program applied to my own area, the DMV, that's the Washington, D.C. with Maryland and Northern Virginia.

  4. I know people that have never voted before who are voting in this election. So different too with so many absentee ballots and early voting. Thanks for your graphs!

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