A week before election day, WHO vote early gets extra attention. NBC News’ tracker of early ballot returns it’s one of several tidbits of who has already voted state by state — tantalizing numbers after a campaign filled with polls suggesting a close race, but nothing more definitive than that.

But while early voting is a useful tool for understanding what’s happened so far, it’s easy to read more than is appropriate into these patterns and what they mean for the 2024 election, given what we know about when different types of people are likely to vote. In particular, we know that young people disproportionately wait until closer to election day to cast their early votes.

Our main takeaway: Even with weeks of early voting already over in some places and just days to go until it’s all over, it’s still dangerous to read too much into partisan runaways about who has voted so far. There’s still time for these patterns to change — and we’ve already seen them change in twists and turns over the last few weeks of early voting.

About 10 days ago, NBC News explored some initial designs on early voting in Virginia, noting that as a share of total 2020 voter turnout, voters in parts of the state that generally support Republican candidates voted more than in parts of the state that generally support Democratic candidates.

Because I speculated that these differences could reduce Virginia once again satellite polling stations frankly, we thought it was premature to conclude from these patterns that Republican learning areas were moving toward higher voter turnout than Democratic learning areas. Consistent with this assumption, the table below of early voting through October 26 shows a substantial leveling off of the use of early voting in different areas.

However, it is still the case that substantially more ballots were cast in areas that generally lean Republican than in other parts of the state.

Even though most satellite polling places are now open, however, these patterns are not clear evidence that total voter turnout will be higher in Republican-leaning areas than in the rest of the state.

One reason for caution is that when votes are cast can vary from state to state.

Previous research shows that older and more experienced voters disproportionately cast their absentee ballots well before Election Day, with younger and less experienced voters waiting until closer to Election Day to cast theirs. Thus, we expect precincts with more older voters who regularly participate in elections to cast their ballots earlier than precincts with more younger voters who participate less frequently.

This is certainly true in Virginia right now: According to our NBC News absentee ballot tracker returns to Virginiaapproximately 44% of the ballots cast to date have been cast by people over the age of 65, compared to only 16% by people under 40. By contrast, in the 2020 election, the TargetSmart voter file shows that 30 percent of voters were under 40 and 24 percent were over 65.

Active turnout operations in an area also likely play a role in determining when people vote. For example, an experiment During the 2020 election, people returned mail-in ballots early when they were randomly assigned to be sent an informational postcard about the mail-in voting process, even though the postcard did not mention the timing.

And given that younger voters are disproportionately Democratic and older voters are disproportionately Republican, there’s reason to expect that, all other things being equal, areas that tend to support Democrats will see more from their absentee ballots cast just before Election Day than the precincts. to support the Republicans. That was the case during Virginia’s 2022 general election: parts of the state that support Democrats the most cast about 57 percent of their absentee ballots within 10 days of the election, while parts of the state who tend to support Republicans returned only 40 percent of their absentee ballots during the final time frame.

Will absentee voting follow similar patterns in Virginia in 2024 as in 2022? It’s really hard to say. One of the broader challenges of interpreting early voting in most states is the lack of sufficient historical data to compare current results.

Because 2020 has resulted in the use of more absentee ballots in many states, we do not trust that the timing of absentee ballots prior to 2020 is necessarily indicative of the patterns we should expect to see now. And because far more mail-in ballots were cast in 2020 than will be mailed this time, we don’t think it’s wise to compare it to 2020.

Benchmarking through 2022 is an option in some states, but there is still reason to suspect that people may vote at different times during presidential elections than midterms. So while we anticipate that there will be more absentee ballots in Virginia in Democratic areas than in Republican areas over the next 10 days, we don’t think we have enough information to be able to say anything concrete about exactly how many.

Another reason we do not conclude that there is likely to be disproportionate turnout in those areas that lean Republican comes from looking at the voting history of people who have already voted in Virginia. The table below shows the number of recent elections in which early Virginia voters participated this year. As previous research suggests, an overwhelming number of the ballots cast thus far have been cast by consistent voters.

If a precinct has a higher than normal turnout, we would expect to see a larger number of less consistent voters turn out. But in any case, the table below shows that people who voted in Republican-leaning areas are more consistent voters than the average absentee in Virginia so far.

These Virginia patterns have implications for how you should think about early voting data reported in any state.

In particular, he says to be very cautious about how you interpret any partisan early voting breakouts reported by NBC News. absentee ballot tracker or any other tracker. In particular, you must consider the possibility that absentee voters from a party may be overrepresented in current returned ballots compared to what the final results will show, due to differences in when voters cast their ballots.

This is especially true in battleground states, where campaign activity is likely to shape when people vote.

And while it may be useful to compare a state’s patterns this year to historical indicators of when votes were cast in the state in 2022, there’s no guarantee that these return patterns will be similar across election cycles.

Finally, we should keep in mind that a vote counts the same whether it is cast on the first day of early voting or when the polls close on election day. And so we should be careful about assuming too much before all the ballots have been cast.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News: