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At the rate Montanans are currently voting, Evan Wilson expects the total number of absentee ballots this cycle will reach 498,000 by Tuesday, Election Day.

Wilson conducts election analysis for Republican campaigns in Montana. He’s the person who predicts how many votes it will take to win Montana’s top races, which means predicting the total number of votes cast.

As of Wednesday, with less than a week left to vote, Montanans had submitted 338,832 ballots, well short of Wilson’s predicted 498,000. He told Capitolized that he is nonetheless confident voters will deliver results.

The reason for its certainty is what is known as ‘404 voters’.

“A 404 voter is someone who voted in the 2016 presidential election and has voted in every federal election since then,” Wilson said. There are enough voters to bring the number of absentee ballots in Montana to 498,000 by the time voting ends at 8 p.m. on Nov. 5.

Wilson is tracking many different trends in voting in Montana. He knows that the majority of Montana voters this cycle do not identify as Montana residents. Only 35% of respondents do, although another third who have lived in the state for at least 20 years still don’t. In Montana’s western U.S. House district, 53% of voters did not live in Montana when incumbent Rep. Ryan Zinke was first elected to Congress in 2014.

Wilson says 2024 turnout — the percentage of Montanans registered to vote who actually vote — will likely look like 2016, i.e. in the middle of the 70th percentile.

The high point for mail-in voting was 2020, when COVID-19 prompted the state to allow counties to issue postage-paid ballots and turnout reached 81%. 612,075 ballots were cast that year, and Republicans won every statewide race.

State voter data shows that 200,000 more absentee ballots were mailed in 2024 than in 2016.