Early voting for Tuesday's Georgia U.S. Senate runoff set daily records three times, ABC News reported.
Polls in all Georgia 159 counties opened Saturday, Nov. 26, and ended Friday for the early voting portion of the U.S. Senate race between Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker.
State elections data showed that 353,436 people voted in-person on Friday, according to state election data. That brought the total number of early votes overall, in person and absentee, to nearly 1.9 million.
The final day's total surpassed Tuesday's one-day record of 304,744 – which, other than the Nov. 28 total of 303,672, was higher than early in-person voting in any other previous election year, ABC News reported.
"Georgia's voting system is working well," Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a Thursday statement.
"While some counties are seeing more voter turnout than they anticipated, most have found a way to manage voter wait-times, and I appreciate the election officials and workers across Georgia who are doing their level-best to accommodate our record turnout."
After Tuesday's vote, Raffensperger said: "Georgia is a national leader in voter access and security. We are having historic levels of turnout and those who want to vote are voting — we believe this level of voter participation is excellent, and we'll keep working with counties to encourage them to open more early voting locations in the future."
Despite this year's large number of cast ballots, experts told ABC News that the totals unlikely would rival early voting turnout levels from the 2021 Senate runoffs, when early voting was available for several weeks.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, last year signed an election bill that set the timeframe for early voting in a runoff from a minimum of 17 days to a minimum of five.
"Early in-person voting is popular, and it's relatively new," University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock said, ABC News reported. "It's compressed into a single week as opposed to being spread over three weeks. So if you're going to do it, you got to move quickly."
Bullock added that an increase in vote totals also could also be attributed to a Democrat-led lawsuit that allowed some of the state's largest counties — which overwhelmingly vote for Democrats — to open polls last Saturday despite guidance from Raffensperger's office that would have prevented voting within two days of a holiday such as Thanksgiving.
"Some of the Democratic counties got to jump on the Republican counties," Bullock said, ABC News reported. "That could have really made the difference. It could be a game changer once we know what the results are."