John has some good info on early voting totals in the post below.
To monitor early and absentee voting, you have to check out this site written by Professor Michael McDonald. BrownSox at DailyKos has a great, crisp analysis today, too.
The McCain campaign is trying to dismiss the surge in early voting by claiming that most of those voting early would just be voting anyway. In other words, all the people showing up are just part of the existing voter pool, which has been polled and surveyed extensively. But, that's not accurate. Professor McDonald dismisses that spin, at least for Georgia and North Carolina, in an interview with the Washington Post:
One question is whether these early voters are just people who ordinarily would have voted on election day. Republicans have suggested that's the case. But there are some pieces of evidence to the contrary. The high percentage of African Americans voting early in Georgia undercuts the GOP argument.That is very good news.
McDonald has compared the list of early voters in North Carolina with the voter registration files. North Carolina allows, in essence, same day registration for early voters. What McDonald has discovered is that there are about 100,000 people who have voted early who were not previously on the voter lists.
Also, McDonald was on Rachel Maddow's show last night to talk about early voting -- an issue of great concern to Ms. Maddow:
