Some 2.5 million people voted Tuesday across the U.S. as more states opened up the early voting period, increasing what was already a record early vote turnout.
The U.S. Elections Project reported a little more than 13 million votes had been cast as of 12:46 a.m. EDT Wednesday. It was 10.5 million just 24 hours earlier -- an increase of roughly 24% in one day.
The numbers are for both in-person voting and mail-in ballots.
The record total continues to be well above the pace of early voting in the 2016 election with three weeks to go before the final votes are cast. At about this same point four years ago, only about 1.4 million people had voted, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
The early vote so far is equal to about 9.4% of the total vote in 2016.
Here are the headlines on voting from Tuesday:
Early voting began Tuesday with long lines in Texas, one of the few places in the U.S. not allowing widespread mail balloting during the pandemic. By Tuesday afternoon, Houston election officials reported more than 100,000 votes had been cast in Harris County, a record turnout for a single day of early voting.
Democrats and their allies have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow for absentee ballots in battleground Wisconsin received up to six days after the election to be counted.
An appeals court on Tuesday night ordered an early end to an extension of Arizona’s voter registration deadline that was ordered by a judge after pandemic restrictions led to a decrease in people signing up to vote.
A severed fiber optic cable that shut down Virginia's online voter registration system has prompted a lawsuit from a civil rights organization. Tuesday was the deadline to register to vote in Virginia before Election Day.
California's Republican Party no longer will label its ballot drop boxes as “official" to avoid confusion with those used by county registrars, but may expand their use even as state officials say they're illegal, a party official said Tuesday.
Billionaire former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is donating $500,000 to juice Democratic turnout in Miami-Dade County. That's a place where the party must bank a massive number of votes if it hopes to win the pivotal swing state of Florida.