'Where do I vote?' Early voting searches, and people looking for how to change them, hit all time high
Early votes are thought to be helpful to the Clinton campaign – but the timing of the surge in people wanting to reverse them won’t be
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Your support makes all the difference.Search trends appear to suggest that more people than ever will vote early – and that many people want to change them to vote for somebody else.
Searches for “where do I vote early?” have climbed to an all-time high this week, Google has said. It has increased 3,200 per cent from September to October, as the election approaches and candidates urge their supporters to vote.
But some of the trends appear more negative for candidates. Many people seem to be looking to change their vote – a trend that’s thought to benefit Donald Trump.
More than 24 million people have already voted in the 2016 election, and many of them have been cast in battleground states. A week before Election Day, early turnout is twice as high as it was at the same time in 2012.
And the searches appear to be coming from battleground states. All five of the counties most looking for how to vote early came from Texas, and the top five states are Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina, Washington DC and Texas.
Other searches related to early voting have also surged. One in particular could be worrying for Ms Clinton’s campaign – since the FBI announced that it was re-opening its investigations into her emails, searches for “change early vote” have surged.
That suggestion appeared to be encouraged by Donald Trump himself days before the election. He encourage people to change their vote back – presumably to support him instead – if they felt that they had made “a big mistake”.
Google has built in social tools for people looking for information about voting. It added special tools to help people register to vote, and now if you search things like “where to vote” or “who’s on my ballot”, the site will pull up the relevant information.
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