Below you’ll find some interesting 2012 Presidential election data from the United States Election Project at George Mason University.* This may surprise some readers since there has not yet been a single Presidential candidate debate, the official in-person election day is over a month away, and relevant and important data and events could be released/happen in the next 36 days.
But why let the possibility of a domestic and/or foreign crisis that might influence your vote get in the way of voting at your convenience?
Here are the numbers so far:
Returned Ballots
A total of 44,663 ballots have been returned in all states and localities for which I [the GMU researcher] have statistics.
IOWA reports 24,304 ballots cast as of Monday morning.
MAINE reports 48 returned ballots as of Monday morning.
NORTH CAROLINA reports 13,500 returned ballots as of Monday morning. (As of Monday morning there are 7 non-reporting counties.)
OHIO 10 counties report 268 returned ballots as of Sunday morning.
SOUTH CAROLINA reports 1,753 returned ballots as of Thursday afternoon.
SOUTH DAKOTA reports 4,790 returned ballots as of Saturday morning.
* For some reason linking isn’t working on our blog platform this evening. So here is the citation for these figures: http://elections.gmu.edu/early_vote_2012.html
PILEUS 
I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
Doesn’t this deserve a Constitutional challenge?
Obviously it’s against the plain-text (“first Tuesday after first Monday”). I understand the other side of the argument. States should be able to take prudential measures to ease poll congestion. Fine. But there should be limits, right?
But who will have standing for a ripe challenge?
Also, I would like to take this opportunity to say “you’re a jerk, Justice Roberts” and you should’ve had the guts to vote against ACA or the Individual Mandate at least