The read · Early voting
Six days of early voting most Kentuckians have never heard of
Since Wednesday morning, every county clerk in Kentucky has been open for in-person voting, six business days before the three-day early-voting window everyone knows about. You need a listed reason to use it, and almost nobody does: 914 Jefferson County voters in 2023, 3,490 in 2024. Here is who qualifies, how it differs from the no-excuse days that start October 29, and what each window was actually worth the last two Novembers, statewide and in the twenty biggest counties.
LOUISVILLE — Kentucky has two early-voting windows, and the one that opened Wednesday morning is the one nobody talks about. From October 21 through October 28, six business days, any voter with one of eleven listed reasons can walk into the county clerk's office and vote. In Jefferson County that is the Election Center on East Liberty Street, 8:30 to 4:30. Then, on Thursday the 29th, the window everyone knows about opens: three days, no reason required, two dozen sites across Louisville, 8 to 6.
The state calls the first one "excused in-person absentee voting" and the second "no-excuse in-person absentee voting," which is part of why nobody has heard of the first one. So here is the plain version of both, and then the numbers.
Who gets the six days. The list is in KRS 117.076(2), effective June 27, 2025, and the clerk will ask you which one applies. Military and overseas voters who will be out of the county. Anyone, or anyone's spouse, with surgery scheduled that requires hospitalization. Voters temporarily living outside Kentucky who are still registered here. Uniformed service members confined to a base. Anyone in the last trimester of a pregnancy. Anyone who cannot get to the polls because of age, disability or illness, and the caregiver who looks after them. Students living outside their home county. Anyone whose work schedule covers every hour the polls are open, commute included. Election officers working this cycle. And anyone who will be out of the county for every day and hour of voting, early days included.
Those last two are wider than they look. A shift worker who clocks in before six and out after six is on the list. A nurse on twelves is on the list. A traveling salesman who will be in Nashville the whole last week of October is on the list. The clerk takes your word for it on a signed form; there is no doctor's note.
Who gets the three days. Everybody. October 29, 30 and 31, Thursday through Saturday, at least eight hours a day between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., hours set county by county. In Jefferson that is 8 to 6 at 24 locations, walk in or drive through, any precinct at any site.
And mail. The portal to request a mailed ballot closed Tuesday night at 11:59. Mail voting in Kentucky is excuse-based too, under a separate statute, KRS 117.085, and the ballot has to be back in the clerk's hands by 6 p.m. on November 3. If you did not ask for one by Tuesday, your remaining options are the two windows above and Election Day itself, 6 to 6 on the third.
Kentucky gives you nine days to vote before Election Day. Six of them have a password. Three of them don't.
What the windows were worth. The State Board of Elections posts a results file for every county that splits each race's votes into Election Day and everything else, and the clerks' official recap sheets, posted on the same site, split the "everything else" into mail, excused and no-excuse. I ran both.
Statewide, in the 2023 governor's race, 314,789 of 1,322,021 votes were cast before Election Day: 23.8 percent, mail and both early windows combined. In the 2024 presidential race it was 796,997 of 2,070,078: 38.5 percent. Kentucky went from one vote in four cast early to nearly two in five in a single year, which is what a presidential electorate does to a habit a governor's electorate had only started.
23.8% → 38.5%
Share of top-of-ticket votes cast before Election Day, 2023 governor to 2024 president, statewide
State Board of Elections unofficial results files, Total Votes minus Election Day Votes, all 120 counties. The before-Election-Day figure combines mail, excused in-person and no-excuse early voting; the state file does not separate them.
Now the part that matters for the six days. Jefferson County's official recap sheet does separate them, precinct by precinct, so I summed all 627. In 2023, of 257,438 ballots: 7,908 by mail, 914 in the six excused days, 44,162 in the three no-excuse days, and 204,454 on Election Day. In 2024, of 357,876 ballots: 20,011 by mail, 3,490 excused, 112,691 no-excuse, 221,632 on Election Day, and 52 provisional.
Read the excused column against the no-excuse column and the whole story of this piece is in it. In 2023 the three open days drew 14,721 voters a day in Louisville. The six excused days drew 152 a day. In 2024 the open days drew 37,564 a day; the excused days, 582. The window with the password moved 0.4 percent of the county's ballots in a governor's year and 1.0 percent in a presidential year. The window without one moved 17 percent, then 31.5.
914 · 3,490
Jefferson County voters who used the six excused days in 2023 and 2024, out of 257,438 and 357,876 ballots
Jefferson County Clerk official precinct recap sheets for the 2023 and 2024 general elections, as posted by the State Board of Elections; all 627 precincts summed. No-excuse early voting the same years: 44,162 and 112,691.
Statewide I can only give you the first half of the six days in 2024: the Secretary of State reported 16,441 excused in-person ballots after the first three of them, 9,739 Republicans, 5,690 Democrats and 1,012 others. Set that against the 656,277 who voted in the three no-excuse days that followed and you have the ratio Louisville shows, give or take. The six-day window is not an early-voting program. It is an accommodation, and Kentuckians treat it like one.
The honest version. It is tempting to read the Jefferson numbers and conclude the excused days don't matter. Two things cut against that. First, 3,490 votes is 3,490 votes, and in a county where a House seat was decided by 340 of them two years ago, a program that sends every identified supporter on that list of eleven to Liberty Street the week of the 21st is not a rounding error; it is a margin. Second, the excused window nearly quadrupled between 2023 and 2024 while the no-excuse window grew two and a half times. Something is growing in that column, and the likeliest something is campaigns that have figured out the shift-worker clause.
The counter-case is just as plain. Nothing on that list of eleven covers the ordinary voter who would simply rather vote on a Tuesday in October than a Tuesday in November, and the law is written so the clerk cannot wave them through. The three open days exist precisely because the six excused ones were never going to carry the load. If Kentucky wanted real early voting it would make the six days open to everyone, and it has not.
The twenty counties. Here is the before-Election-Day share, both years, for the twenty counties I spent the last month reading one at a time. Same source as the statewide number: the state's results file, top of the ticket, Total Votes minus Election Day Votes.
:::table caption: Share of top-of-ticket votes cast before Election Day, 2023 governor and 2024 president, twenty largest counties. State Board of Elections unofficial results files; "before Election Day" combines mail, excused in-person and no-excuse early voting. columns: County | 2023 votes | Before Election Day 2023 | 2024 votes | Before Election Day 2024 Jefferson | 256,773 | 20.6% | 354,094 | 38.1% Fayette | 103,545 | 22.0% | 143,932 | 29.7% Kenton | 49,371 | 26.8% | 80,948 | 44.8% Boone | 39,978 | 16.1% | 67,421 | 32.5% Warren | 34,855 | 36.3% | 56,891 | 54.6% Hardin | 28,847 | 31.8% | 48,082 | 39.4% Daviess | 30,469 | 26.6% | 47,097 | 31.4% Campbell | 31,160 | 17.4% | 48,334 | 32.7% Madison | 27,093 | 34.9% | 45,188 | 55.1% Bullitt | 24,958 | 37.5% | 43,209 | 58.1% McCracken | 20,966 | 16.2% | 31,947 | 32.2% Oldham | 26,130 | 30.9% | 38,210 | 56.7% Pulaski | 19,097 | 31.5% | 31,735 | 56.4% Laurel | 15,837 | 22.5% | 27,887 | 29.5% Christian | 12,030 | 23.4% | 21,671 | 43.1% Scott | 19,377 | 30.7% | 29,769 | 44.5% Pike | 12,751 | 13.3% | 23,950 | 27.0% Jessamine | 17,112 | 23.0% | 26,685 | 34.6% Franklin | 19,701 | 31.6% | 25,763 | 46.6% Shelby | 16,701 | 17.3% | 24,620 | 26.8% Statewide | 1,322,021 | 23.8% | 2,070,078 | 38.5% :::
Two things jump off that table. Early voting is a county habit before it is a state one: Bullitt, Madison, Oldham, Pulaski and Warren all cast more than half their 2024 ballots before Election Day, while Shelby, Pike, Laurel and Fayette stayed under 30, and the spread between them is wider than the spread between the two years. And Louisville, for all its 24 sites, sits right at the state average, not above it. The county with the most early-voting infrastructure in Kentucky uses it at the same rate as Hardin.
What to do with it this week. If you are running a campaign: the eleven reasons are a list, and your voter file has the people on it. Your over-80s. Your identified supporters who work nights. Your college kids registered at home. They can vote this week, at the clerk's office, and every one of them you move is one fewer you are chasing on the third. If you are a voter: the clerk's page lists the reasons, and if one of them is honestly you, Liberty Street is open until 4:30.
What I'm watching is the no-excuse count on the night of October 31. If Louisville clears 112,691 again in a midterm, with no president on the ballot, then Kentucky has become a state that votes early, and the whole shape of the last week changes. If it comes in closer to 2023's 44,162, then four votes in five still happen on the day, and the weekend is still the program. I'll have the clerk's number the morning after.
Disclosure: I work in Kentucky Democratic politics. I'm not paid by, and don't advise, any candidate named above. Dates, hours and eligibility are from the State Board of Elections (elect.ky.gov), the Jefferson County Clerk and KRS 117.076 and 117.085. Statewide and county before-Election-Day shares are the State Board of Elections' unofficial results files for the 2023 and 2024 general elections. Jefferson County vote-method counts are the county's official precinct recap sheets as posted by the State Board, all 627 precincts summed. The three-day statewide excused figure for 2024 is the Secretary of State's, as reported October 29, 2024.