Early Voting Starts Saturday in Four States While Other States Use Up Their Last One

Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Florida join the early voting map on Saturday, while voters in Georgia and Tennessee get their last Saturday and voters in Texas and Louisiana get their only one. Election Day itself is still ten days away, on Tuesday, November 3, but for people who cannot reach a polling place on a weekday, Saturday is when the election actually happens.

The National Conference of State Legislatures counts 47 states plus the District of Columbia offering early in-person voting to all voters, with early periods averaging 20 days and running anywhere from three to 46 days. Saturday voting is far less uniform than that headline suggests: 27 states offer it, 13 offer Sunday voting, and 25 states plus Puerto Rico require at least some weekend voting. The rest leave the weekend to local officials, or skip it.

The four states opening Saturday are Florida, Michigan, New Jersey and New York. The practical detail that trips voters up first is the site: an early voting location is often different from the polling place assigned for Election Day, in New Jersey and in New York City alike, so the address on the Election Day card is not the address to use this weekend. Florida counties may extend the required October 24 through October 31 window to October 19 through November 1 at the supervisor of elections’ discretion.

Michigan’s Saturday start is written into the state constitution. Voters passed an amendment in 2022 requiring at least nine days of early in-person voting in every community, beginning on the second Saturday before the election, and the state’s sites must stay open at least eight hours every day through Sunday, November 1. “Starting this weekend, all registered Michigan voters can cast a ballot in person at their early voting sites,” Deputy Secretary of State Aghogho Edevbie said in the department’s announcement, calling early voting “a convenient option that lets you cast your ballot on your own schedule at a time that works best for you.” Eligible Michigan citizens who still need to register can do so at their city or township clerk’s office up to 8 p.m. on Election Day, and cast a ballot the same day.

New Jersey’s polls stay open late through the whole window: until 8 in the evening on weekdays and Saturdays, and until 6 in the evening on Sundays, through November 1. Voters who were issued a mail-in ballot and show up in person instead will vote by provisional ballot, because the electronic pollbook at the site shows the mail ballot already issued. The weekend is not a quiet corner of New Jersey’s vote: 741,924 ballots were cast during last year’s early in-person period, and more than 230,000 of them, 104,428 on the final Saturday and 126,555 on the final Sunday, arrived on the last weekend alone, after a record 1,172,842 early ballots in 2024.

New York’s hours shift by county and by day, which makes the county list the document to check rather than any statewide summary. New York City’s sites run 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on both Saturdays and both Sundays, with evening hours to 8 p.m. only on Tuesday and Wednesday, while Suffolk County’s weekend hours run 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, October 24, is also New York’s voter-registration deadline and the last day to apply online or by mail for an early mail ballot.

Ohio has been voting since October 6, which gave its voters four Saturdays, and by October 23 the secretary of state’s dashboard counted 1,240,470 early ballots issued and 922,793 returned, a return rate of about 74 percent, with 527,760 of those cast in person. The 922,793 completed ballots come to 11.2 percent of the roughly 8.2 million voters Ohio registered in 2024. Ohio’s remaining hours are 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, October 24, and again on Saturday, October 31, with 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, November 1.

Georgia and Tennessee are where Saturday runs out. Georgia law requires early voting from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the second and third Saturdays before the election, which this year are October 17 and October 24, so today is the last Saturday the statute guarantees. Tennessee’s window runs October 14 through October 29, and local papers in Anderson and Roane counties billed this Saturday as the final one, with half-day hours of 9 a.m. to noon in Anderson County and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Roane County. Anderson County had 8,143 early voters by Thursday out of 54,127 registered voters.

Texas and Louisiana get one Saturday each, for opposite reasons. Texas opened on October 19 and closes on October 30, a window that holds a single Saturday, and a 2025 Texas law that would require weekend early voting is not yet in force because it waits on a report the secretary of state has not published. Louisiana votes Monday through Saturday, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., with no Sunday voting at all, and its October 20 through October 27 window holds the same single Saturday. South Carolina keeps the same Monday-to-Saturday pattern with no Sundays, but its longer window still leaves voters two Saturdays.

Kentucky’s entire no-excuse early voting window is three days, Thursday, October 29 through Saturday, October 31, so its one Saturday is the last day of the window, while North Carolina guarantees only the last Saturday, October 31, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., with counties free to add earlier weekends. Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire sit outside the system entirely: they offer no early in-person voting, only absentee voting for voters who qualify. Pennsylvania has no early voting either, but voters there can request, complete and return a mail ballot in a single visit to their county election office until 5 p.m. on October 27. After Saturday, only three jurisdictions have yet to open at all: the District of Columbia on October 26, Oklahoma on October 28, and Kentucky on October 29.

Bergen County has 10 early voting sites, Essex County has 11, Morris County has eight, Passaic County has 10 and Sussex County has three. Each county’s list sits on the state Division of Elections website.