Edward McKinley reports in the Times Union that in just one day New York just about doubled early voting totals from the June primary election. Cheryl L. Couser from the state Board of Elections reported the unofficial count of votes cast statewide for Oct. 24 was 211,898. In the June primary, 118,108 early votes were cast. Locally, there were many long lines at early polling locations over the weekend. In Catskill on Oct. 25, it took a WGXC staff member 90 minutes to vote from first getting in line to leaving the Greene County Office Building where voting is taking place on the fourth floor. Rensselaer County election officials posted on Twitter that 1,661 votes were cast at three locations across the county on Oct. 24, with the lines so long it took 40 minutes past the deadline to end voting for the day. "I'm encouraged to see so many people coming out to vote. This is pretty much the situation in all early voting sites," Dutchess County Republican Board of Elections Commissioner Erik Haight said. The long lines show early voting is clearly more popular than ever this year, but so is voting by mail. In Ulster County, 22,000 absentee ballots were requested, compared to 8,000 requested for the 2016 presidential election, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports. The Associated Press reported that the number of people casting an early ballot in the presidential election across the country this year so far, 58 million, is already more than the number who voted early during all of 2016. Ballot counts begin to be announced when polls close Nov. 3.