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More Than 1 Million New Yorkers Cast Early Ballots, Just Shy of 2020 Record
This year, the city opened 155 early voting sites, where New Yorkers encountered smooth sailing and short lines
NEW YORK - Headed into Election Day, a near record number of New Yorkers have already voted early.
According to the city Board of Elections’ unofficial tally, 1,089,328 voters cast ballots in the early voting period, which ran from Oct. 26 through Nov. 3.
That’s just shy of the 1.1 million early voters that turned out in 2020, the first presidential election in which early voting was allowed in New York. Voters then endured long lines, chaos and COVID-related complications at 88 early voting sites that were often unable to meet demand.
But in 2024, the city opened 155 early voting sites — and by almost all accounts, voting proceeded efficiently and without delay. On Sunday alone, 149,319 New Yorkers voted early, the highest single-day early voting total in NYC history, according to the Board.
All in all, the number of people who voted represented about 20% of registered voters in the city.
Polls open on Election Day at 6 a.m. and close at 9 p.m, and you can find your polling location, which may differ from your early voting site, here. The Board of Elections, which predicts a busy day with some lines, is offering an election day wait time map.
Michelle Quimi, 31, who works at a charter school in The Bronx, was among early voters when she cast her ballot last week at the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community Center part of the NYCHA Sotomayor Houses in Soundview.
“I do work in the education system so sometimes the polls during Election Day are, like, really packed, and I don't want to miss a chance,” she told THE CITY, just after casting her vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
At the top of the ballot, the presidential race has gotten major attention last week from Puerto Ricans in The Bronx, migrants living in the city’s shelters and progressives sending handwritten notes to swing states in such high numbers that they’ve bought out postcard stamps at post offices all across the city.
Juditch Pisano, a 67-year-old Puerto Rican living in Bensonhurst, said she heard the notorious “garbage island” joke told by a comedian at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally — but that didn’t change her mind.
“Who else but Trump? He’s my man. I think he's great,” she said. “He's a strong man even though maybe they don't like the way he talks. So what? What we need is the best for our country, for our kids and our children that have seven grandkids.”
The races to watch in the five boroughs include several state-level contests in purple parts of the city that could see Republicans gain a bigger share of the heavily blue state legislature. But educating voters attuned to the top of the ticket about those State Senate and Assembly races has been tough for candidates.
Even in a super tight legislative race in Howard Beach — where the Democratic incumbent won by just 15 votes last time around — voters have hardly registered the competitiveness of the contest, or anything about the candidates.
Judge races are also on the ballot, with a handful of competitive races for judicial jobs that will affect how thousands of cases are adjudicated in local courts every year.
And New Yorkers have flipped their ballots to find a series of six questions, one to change the state constitution and the rest to change the City Charter. Proposal 1, an amendment to strengthen anti-discrimination rights and enshrine the right to an abortion in the state, has faced major pushback from New York Republicans and right-leaning advocates who have fought it on the grounds that it would give new rights to trans people and immigrants.
Locally, ballot questions two through six deal with city-level government reforms set forth by a commission convened by Mayor Eric Adams over the summer. City Hall says they’re common-sense changes that will make city operations easier, but opponents in the City Council are campaigning hard against them, saying they amount to a rush-through power grab by the mayor.
Tanya Campbell, 52, told THE CITY after voting last week at the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Community Center in Soundview, “I don’t want Trump in office, and I want to give a Black woman a shot.”
Campbell, who had her 10-year-old son Wendell in tow, added “I told my son too many people died for Black people to have this privilege or for people as a whole to have this privilege. And I’m taking him to see what he needs to do when comes of that age. Vote.”
The top-of-the-ballot contest pushed Dave, a teacher from Bensonhurst who declined to share his last name, to cast an early vote for Trump — the first time he did so. For him, the influx of migrants galvanized him to vote Republican.
“I do see that they were trying to open a migrant shelter around here recently,” he said. “I was really against that. This issue falls to Democrats.”
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