More than 43 million voters have already cast ballots with only days to go before the United States midterm elections on 3 November, Hiru News reported on Friday morning, attributing the figure to foreign media.

The election will decide which party controls the US Congress for the next two years.

Where the race stands

Al Jazeera’s survey five days out, published on Thursday, puts Democrats on 51.4 per cent and Republicans on 43.2 per cent in RealClearPolling’s national polling average — a gap of 8.2 percentage points.

Al Jazeera’s Phil Lavelle, reporting from Texas, said Republicans are particularly concerned about turnout in rural areas, where 21 per cent of registered voters had cast ballots against 24 per cent in more heavily populated metropolitan areas. Republican voters have historically preferred to vote on election day itself, which leaves room for that gap to close.

A caution on the 43 million figure

The early-vote total rests on Hiru’s filing alone. Hiru credits “foreign media” without naming an outlet, and this desk could not match the figure to a verified international newsroom’s own reporting.

Al Jazeera’s piece, published the same day and covering the same election at the same point in the campaign, does not carry an early-voting total — it reports polling averages and state-level turnout percentages instead. CNN maintains a running early-vote tracker, but the figure this desk could retrieve from it was materially lower and attached to an earlier date, so it does not confirm Hiru’s number either.

The two sources here corroborate each other on the state of the race five days out. They do not corroborate each other on the 43 million figure, and readers should treat that total as single-sourced and uncorroborated.

Context

A federal judge on Thursday rejected a Trump administration request to set aside roughly 20,000 ballots in California, in a case over so-called “noncitizen” ballots. That ruling is reported separately by Al Jazeera and by Hiru and is not covered in either source cited above.

Not reported

Neither filing breaks the early vote down between mail-in and in-person ballots, by state, or by party registration. Neither gives a comparison figure for the same point in the 2022 midterms, so no claim about a record can be drawn from what is reported here.

Nothing in either source states the date on which the 43 million total was measured, which matters for a number that rises daily. No filing reports expected total turnout, or how many states were included in the count.