How Iowa is voting early

The 2026 report is posted on weekday mornings and replaces the previous day’s file, so Iowa First Check collects it each morning and keeps every report. Requested and issued are shown as secondary information; they can differ in the source and are shown exactly as printed. These are registration and ballot-status counts: they do not show how anyone voted and do not establish that a ballot was counted.

A comparison is shown only when the earlier election has a report on exactly the same day; nothing is interpolated or taken from a nearby date, and unavailable comparisons are labeled. Each report also states when its data was pulled. The 2022 reports from Oct. 18 on say “Data from night before”; the 2024 reports and the 2026 reports through Oct. 19 give only an early-morning pull time (2 to 3 a.m. Central), from which we infer the data runs through the prior day, while reports from Oct. 20, 2026 on say “Data as of 08:00” on the report date, which is Central time. Elections are lined up by report date either way. That inference is kept separate from the explicit statements in the data download, which also carries the alternative alignment by data cutoff. Two 2022 report dates (Oct. 6 and Nov. 15) each appear twice in the source with no way to tell which copy is later, so they are left out of every comparison.

The pace chart starts 20 days before Election Day for ballots received and by default runs through Election Day, so the whole trajectory of 2022 and 2024 is visible next to the 2026 reports so far. The range toggle can instead stop every year at the point the latest 2026 report has reached. Reports from before the 20-day mark are in the data download. Freshness is judged from the latest report date and the current date; reports normally appear on weekday mornings, so weekends are not counted as late.

Party is registration as listed by the source: Democrat, Republican, No Party and Other (2024 also lists Libertarian). This page groups Libertarian with Other for display only; the data keeps the original categories. A county missing from the first two 2022 reports (Taylor) is treated as zero because the statewide total reconciles only that way; that zero is inferred from reconciliation, not a reported observation.

The “Dig deeper” panels use the same reports. Return rate is ballots received divided by ballots issued. The daily pace is the average number of new ballots per day between one report and the next. How returned ballots came back uses the state’s receipt-method rows, which add up to the ballots received (one 2022 report is off by a single ballot). How ballots were issued comes from a table the state began publishing in its report dated Oct. 20, 2026, when the layout of the report changed, so it has no earlier history and no 2022 or 2024 comparison. The count of ballots not yet returned is derived from each party’s requested, issued and received totals and is not shown on this page. All of it is in the second data download.