Washington, Oct 22 (IANS): More than 10 per cent of registered voters in the US had already voted by Tuesday with election day still two weeks away.

The University of Florida’s Election Lab, which tracks early polling and related issues said that 17,768,575 voters had had their ballot by Tuesday.

According to the most recent data, cited by other sources, there were an estimated 161 million registered voters in 2022.

Of these early votes cast so far, 6,685,740 were in-person early votes, and 10,986,247 mail ballots were returned. Many more mail ballots were cast as the number requested stood at 57,289,583.

Election day is November 3.

Early voting is becoming a key feature of US elections, getting a boost in the 2020 elections, which took place amidst a raging COVID-19 outbreak.

Americans voted mostly by mail and early when polling booths were less likely to be crowded. According to the New York Times, more than 30 million votes had been cast by this time in 2020; in all, 65.6 million people voted by mail that year, and another 35.8 million voted early in person.

Early voting had been popular with Democrats, but Republicans are catching up despite mixed messaging from their presidential nominee Donald Trump, the former president, who had criticised early voting but is now urging Republicans to vote early.

By past Friday, 177,000 votes had been cast in Louisiana, which is a record for the deeply conservative/Republican state.

While Democrats accounted for 44/8 per cent — 4,094,729 —of the total early votes cases so far, Republicans were at 33.5 per cent — 3,061,714, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.

Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who maintains the early voting numbers for Election Lab, told The Wall Street Journal the data so far shows more of a shift in how Republicans are casting their ballot rather than an indication of how the party is performing.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and former President Trump, the Republican candidate, are tied in polls and are campaigning hard in the seven battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona — trying to persuade a shrinking number of undecided voters.