Vermonters are responding in large numbers to the opportunity to cast their votes before Election Day via universal mail-in balloting. According to the Secretary of State’s office, town and city clerks have received, and accepted for processing, a total of 125,904 ballots as of the latest count, issued this (Thursday) morning. (Another 18,088 ballots have been returned by voters but not yet officially accepted. It’s a thing.)

Which means, for one, that candidates spending money between now and Election Day are already too late to influence approximately one-third of the electorate. Something to bear in mind for future campaigns. Universal mailed ballots are here to stay, and more and more people will get familiar with the slightly discomfiting process. (Okay, the ballot goes in this envelope, which then gets stuffed in this other envelope, and then I sign that envelope, and somehow the whole process identifies me as the voter but not who I voted for. I think.)

But the main point for my purposes is that one hell of a lot of Vermonters have already participated, and all signs point to a record high vote total. Indeed, the old record might be completely obliterated.

The current standard of 370,968 was set in 2020, which featured a high-stakes presidential election and the debut of universal mail-in balloting — one of the few nice things we got out of the pandemic. Well, we are already one-third of the way to matching that turnout record.

By sheer numbers, we’re behind the pace set four years ago. As of October 23, 2020, more than 184,000 ballots had been received. Math whizzes in the audience may notice that’s quite a bit higher than today’s 125,904. So why do I think we’re on the way to beating 2020?

Because in 2020, the pandemic was still an epidemic. People were avoiding indoor public locations like, um, polling places. Of the 370,968 votes cast, roughly 280,000 were cast early. That’s 75% of the total.

This year the polling places will be wide open, and we can expect more voters to wait until Election Day. How many more? Impossible to say for sure, but grounds for reasonable speculation.

At this point four years ago, roughly 65% of all early votes had been received for processing. If we apply the same percentage to today’s total, we get an expected early vote of roughly 208,000 which, again, math whizzes, is quite a bit less than 280,000.

However… Because things are much more open now than in 2020, it’s fair to expect quite a bit more in-person participation on November 5. How much more?

What if, instead of 25% of all votes cast in person as in 2020, we see 50% of all votes cast the old-fashioned way? That doesn’t seem too far-fetched at all. In that case, we’d be looking at total turnout of 408,000, which would break 2020’s record by more than 37,000 votes. It would be the first time we got anywhere close to the 400,000 mark, let alone surpass it by a comfortable margin.

But maybe the in-person percentage isn’t 50%. It doesn’t have to be. It can be quite a bit lower than that and still set a new record for participation.

I’ve just piled supposition on top of supposition, always a dangerous practice, but I don’t see any weak links in the chain. I think we’re going to see very high participation — in fact, I feel safe in predicting a higher turnout than we’ve ever had before.