Maybe you are one of the millions of Americans who cannot wait for this election to be over, or alternatively, maybe you are paying no attention to this election. (There’s really no third option.)

But the weary countdown—46 days left!—misses an important fact: In many places, voting is already underway. Voting began in parts of Wisconsin on Monday. Starting Friday, anyone in Minnesota can cast an absentee ballot, and they need no excuse to do so. So can Virginia voters. Meanwhile, a slew of other states are already taking absentee ballot requests. The list includes some of the most hotly contested swing states, including Florida, Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina. In those cases, there’s no way to know how the people getting their ballots will mark them, but there are ways to make some educated guesses based on who has made a request. Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who runs the invaluable United States Elections Project, calculates that 5,649 people have already voted (as of publication—the number keeps climbing).

Start with North Carolina. So far, about 61,600 absentee ballots have been requested, an increase over the pace four years ago. Based on voter registration, those requesters are split evenly, 35-35 between Democrats and Republicans, with another 28 percent unaffiliated. A much smaller number have been returned—around 5,500—but Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College, crunches the numbers and finds that they look different from 2012:

However, both registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters are overperforming their same-day cumulative totals in comparison to 2012's numbers: registered unaffiliated accepted ballots are 167 percent of their same-day totals four years ago, registered Democratic accepted ballots are 153 percent of same-day totals from four years ago, and registered Republican accepted ballots are 93 percent of their same-day totals from 2012.

Bitzer notes that affiliation can be a little misleading in North Carolina, where there remain conservative voters who are legacy Democrats and have not switched registration, but are still unlikely to vote for the more liberal candidates the party puts forward.