More than 44 million Americans have cast an early ballot so far this election cycle, a substantial total that cements how voting patterns have changed in the country since the 2020 election.

Most of them are repeat customers.

Roughly 77 percent of the early votes cast across the country as of Tuesday have come from voters who also voted early in 2020. Just 13 percent of the early vote total so far were from voters who cast an in-person ballot on Election Day in 2020.

The fixed nature of the early vote turnout so far has made election prognostication difficult, especially when trying to parse whether overall turnout will remain as high as it was in 2020 and 2022, or whether either party is truly building an edge.

In states that have voted almost exclusively by mail since at least 2016, early voting is happening at a slower pace. With a week left in the election, one million ballots have been cast this year in Washington State, compared with 2.2 million at this point in 2020, according to voting data stored by The New York Times. In Oregon, 578,000 ballots have been cast this year, compared with 1.3 million at this point in 2020. And in Colorado, one million ballots have been cast this year, compared with 1.7 million in 2020.

This could portend a lower turnout election than in 2020, which had the highest turnout in modern history. But because the last presidential election was held during the coronavirus pandemic — when the postal service was pushed to the brink and Americans worried about whether the country could successfully hold an election by mail — voting patterns were abnormal.

“There were so many warnings about mail delays, and people were experiencing those, you could see that people in 2020 were returning their ballots earlier than in 2016,” said Michael McDonald, a politics professor at the University of Florida who tracks voting. “So it may be that we’ve reverted back to a pre-Covid time, where people aren’t as anxious about mail delays.”

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