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At the pace Montanans are currently voting, Evan Wilson expects the total number of absentee ballots cast this cycle to hit 498,000 by Tuesday, Election Day.
Wilson does election analytics for Republican campaigns in Montana. He’s the person who forecasts how many votes it will take to win Montana’s top-ticket races, which means forecasting total ballots cast.
Wednesday, with less than a week left to vote, Montanans had turned in 338,832 ballots, well short of Wilson’s predicted 498,000. He told Capitolized he is nonetheless confident voters will deliver.
The reason for his certainty is what’s known as “404 voters.”
“A 404 voter is someone who voted in the 2016 presidential election and has voted in all federal elections since then,” Wilson said. There are enough of those voters to push Montana’s absentee ballot count to 498,000 by the time voting ends at 8 p.m. on Nov. 5.
Wilson tracks a lot of different trends in Montana voting. He knows that the majority of Montana voters in this cycle don’t identify as Montana natives. Only 35% of those polled do, though another third, who have lived in the state for at least 20 years, still don’t. In Montana’s western U.S. House district, 53% of voters weren’t living in Montana when incumbent Rep. Ryan Zinke was first elected to Congress in 2014.
Wilson says 2024 turnout — the percentage of Montanans who are registered to vote and who actually vote — is likely to look like 2016, which is to say in the mid-70th percentile.
The high-water mark for voting by mail was 2020, when COVID-19 prompted the state to allow counties to issue postage-paid mail ballots and turnout hit 81%. There were 612,075 ballots cast that year, and Republicans won every statewide race.
State voter data shows 200,000 more absentee ballots were sent out in 2024 than in 2016.
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