Paul Gronke writes:

The 2012 Early Voting Calendar is now available. It displays the opening and closing periods of absentee and early in-person voting for every state and the District of Columbia. This provides a nice visual display of who votes, and when, across the nation. It shows, for example, how many states have standardized their domestic absentee mailing period at 45 days prior to the election as an unintended (I believe) consequence of the MOVE Act. And it shows how widely variant early in-person voting periods are across the country, lengthening and complicating the electoral calendar for campaigners.

As with any national summary of information in our highly decentralized elections system, there are a number of caveats. We have coded states as having “early in-person” voting even if what they described to us on the phone is a “one-step” process with absentee ballots where a citizen can show up, request, complete, and turn in an absentee ballot, yet the state does not like to use the term “early in person” voting (South Dakota is a nice example). Also, the calendar should be used in conjunction with expected usage rates of early voting, data that is reported by Michael McDonald, by the EAC’s EAVS survey, and on the Non-Precinct Place voting page at the Pew Center on the States.