Thirty-four days before the general election, the number of Iowans who had requested absentee ballots (292,694) already exceeds the number of Iowans who cast early votes in the 2000 general election (276,836). At this point, Democrats have requested about twice as many absentee ballots as have Republicans and have returned more than three times as many ballots to county auditors.

Looking at the daily numbers I’ve archived here, you can see that as promised, Republicans have made up ground on early GOTV since the Secretary of State’s Office started releasing absentee ballot totals on September 17.

After the jump I’ve posted the latest tables showing absentee ballots requested by voters and returned to county auditors statewide and in each of the four Congressional districts.  

The data in this table come from the statewide statistical reports, which you can download as pdf files on this page of the Iowa Secretary of State’s website.

Election year	total Democratic vote	Democrats voting early	total Republican vote	Republicans voting early	total no-party vote	no-party voting early
2000	411,920	107,505	456,664	109,827	437,947	59,504
2004	492,050	193,766	510,214	141,196	495,477	125,097
2008	568,377	250,104	491,342	156,986	467,762	138,328
2010	395,312	155,421	447,445	136,243	281,546	68,499

Absentee ballots requested by Iowa voters as of October 3, 2012

Congressional district	Democrats	Republicans	no-party voters
IA-01	43,441	16,805	19,137
IA-02	43,977	17,517	17,270
IA-03	40,205	20,888	14,156
IA-04	27,969	19,144	11,944
statewide	155,592	74,354	62,507

Absentee ballots received by Iowa county auditors as of October 3, 2012

Congressional district	Democrats	Republicans	no-party voters
IA-01	17,475	4,028	5,526
IA-02	17,725	4,359	4,635
IA-03	12,685	4,236	3,022
IA-04	11,807	5,017	3,552
statewide	59,962	17,640	16,735