Colorado Military and Overseas Civilian Voting Up Compared to 2020

As I’ve begun tracking early voting activity some have pointed out for many states that I’m reporting votes cast even though in-person early voting hasn’t started or election officials haven’t sent mail ballots to domestic voters yet.

This is indeed true, voting for domestic voters has only started in a few states. However, a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) requires that election officials send ballots to military (stationed domestically and abroad) and to overseas civilian voters who requested them no later than 45 data before an election. The deadline fell on Saturday, Sept. 21, and some election offices opted to send UOCAVA ballots on Friday, Sept. 20.

Some election offices send ballots electronically to UOCAVA voters, and these voters can effectively return ballots electronically, too. Some election officials accept scanned ballots as email attachments and federal law requires all election officials to accept faxed ballots. UOCAVA voters can scan ballots, send as an email attachment to a fax service, which forwards the ballot to election officials. Thus, some UOCAVA voters began voting almost as soon as they received their ballots.

Anecdotally, I am hearing from election officials there is unusually high levels of voting among UOCAVA voters. Some states have delayed sending ballots to litigation over who will appear on the ballot, so I can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison everywhere on UOCAVA voting activity the same number of days before the election in, say, 2020.

A state where I do have individual ballot return data for 2020 and 2024 is Colorado. Colorado is a good state for this comparison because election officials send UOCAVA mail ballots weeks before they send mail ballots to domestic civilian voters. What does Colorado tell us?