One week before Election Day, WHO Interest in early voting is increasing. NBC News Follower of early voting results One of the few pieces of information that provides information on who voted state by state; Exciting final numbers after a campaign packed with polls that hinted at a close race but suggest there’s nothing more certain than that.

But while early voting is a useful tool for understanding what’s happened to date, it’s easy to read more into these patterns and what they mean for the 2024 election than is appropriate, given what we know about when different types of people might turn out to vote. vote. We know that young people, in particular, disproportionately wait until closer to Election Day to vote early.

Our key takeaway: Even with weeks of early voting already complete in some places and mere days until it’s all over, it’s still dangerous to speculate too much about partisan divides about who’s voted so far. There’s still time for these patterns to change, and we’ve already seen them shift in fits and starts in recent weeks of early voting.

About 10 days ago NBC News explored some initial patterns He noted that in early voting in Virginia, as a share of total turnout in 2020, voters in parts of the state that generally support Republican candidates cast more ballots than in parts of the state that generally support Democratic candidates.

Because we predicted that these differences could reduce Virginia’s rate once again. satellite polling places When opened, we thought it was too early to conclude based on these patterns that areas where Republicans learned were trending towards higher turnout than areas where Democrats learned. Consistent with this hypothesis, the chart below for early voting through October 26 shows significant equalization of early voting in different areas.

However, in general, it seems that more votes are cast in areas where Republicans are in the majority than in other parts of the state.

While most satellite voting locations are now open, these patterns are not clear evidence that overall turnout will be higher in Republican-majority counties than in the rest of the state.

One reason to still be careful is that the timing of when votes are cast can vary from state to state.

previous research It shows that older, more experienced voters disproportionately cast their ballots well before Election Day, while younger, less experienced voters waited until closer to Election Day to cast their ballots. Therefore, we expect districts with older voters who regularly participate in elections to cast their absentee ballots earlier than districts with more younger voters who participate less.

That’s certainly true for Virginia right now: According to NBC News Tracking absentee ballot returns in VirginiaApproximately 44% of the uncast votes to date were cast by people over the age of 65, while only 16% were cast by people under the age of 40. In contrast, in the 2020 election, TargetSmart’s voter file shows 30% voted. voters were under 40 and 24% were over 65.

Vote get-out operations active in a precinct also likely play a role in determining when people vote. For example, an experiment During the 2020 election, people randomly assigned to receive an informative postcard about the mail-in voting process were found to return their mail-in ballots earlier, even though the timing was not mentioned on the postcard.

Given that young voters are disproportionately Democratic and older voters are disproportionately Republican, all else being equal, more voters vote immediately before Election Day in areas that tend to support Democrats than in areas that tend to support Democrats There is reason to expect that the compass will be used. To support Republicans. That was the case in Virginia’s 2022 general election: The parts of the state that most support Democrats cast about 57% of absentee ballots within 10 days of the election, while the parts of the state that tend to support Republicans returned only 40% of their votes. absentee ballots during this final extension time period.

Will absentee voting follow similar patterns in Virginia in 2024 as in 2022? It’s really hard to say. One of the larger challenges of interpreting early vote totals in most states is that there is not enough historical data to make comparisons with current returns.

Because 2020 led to increased use of absentee voting in many states, we do not trust that data on the timing of absentee ballots prior to 2020 are currently indicative of the patterns we should expect to observe. And since there are so many more vote-by-mail votes in 2020 than there will be by mail this time around, we don’t think it would be wise to make a comparison based on 2020.

Benchmarking to 2022 is an option in some states, but there are still reasons to suspect people may vote at different times during presidential elections than in midterm elections. So, while we anticipate that more ballots will be cast in Democratic precincts than Republican precincts in Virginia over the next 10 days, we don’t think we have enough information to say anything concrete about exactly how many votes were cast.

Another reason why we don’t conclude that disproportionate turnout is likely in areas where Republicans are weak comes from looking at the voting history of people who have voted in Virginia. The table below shows the number of recent elections in which Virginia early voters participated this year. As previous research has shown, the vast majority of votes cast so far have been cast by consistent voters.

If a district is going to experience higher than normal turnout, we would expect to observe a larger number of less consistent voters voting. But the chart below shows that people voting in Republican-majority districts have been more consistent voters so far than the average person casting an absentee ballot in Virginia.

These patterns in Virginia have implications for how you should think about early voting data reported in any state.

In particular, he says you should be very careful about how you interpret the partisan outbursts in early voting that NBC News has reported. tracker of absentee ballot returns or any other viewer. In particular, you need to consider the possibility that absentee voters from one party may be overrepresented on available ballots compared to what the final results would indicate, due to differences in when voters cast their absentee ballots.

This is especially true in battleground states, where campaign activity takes shape as people vote.

And while it’s useful to compare a state’s patterns this year with historical markers of when the state votes in 2022, nothing guarantees that these return patterns will be similar across election cycles.

Finally, we must keep in mind that a vote counts the same whether it is cast on the first day of early voting or at the close of the polls on Election Day. Therefore, we must be careful about making too many assumptions before all the votes are taken.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News: