Voters turned out in the rain on day two of early voting for the March 3 primary on Wednesday.

The rain wasn’t enough to keep voters away on Wednesday. Early voting in Smith County continued through day two at a clip that could set new records.

Smith County Election Administrator Karen Nelson said 1,235 ballots were cast on Wednesday. Nelson also said Tuesday’s ballot count was higher than initially expected, with 1,400 ballots cast, the highest for first day of early voting in recent history. In 2016, 1,243 ballots were cast on the first day and in 2016, the year the current early voting total was set, 994 were cast.

The current total through just two days of voting sits at 2,635 ballots cast. Voters have cast 2,204 votes in the republican primary and 431 votes for democrats.

Nelson said that so far early voting is going smoothly, and she expects that to carry over into election day with the steps the county has taken to improve ease of voting since November.

“I feel really good. We’ve got the county liaison team on board to go to 20 locations and then we’ve got the IT teams ready to go to locations as needed,” Nelson said. “With all that extra help it’s going to go well.”

After issues with connectivity and machines crashing in November, the county put together a team to assess what had went wrong and put a plan of action in place. That plan includes utilizing more voting machines, additional locations, moving some polling places to locations better suited for voters and an IT team deployed to key locations to quickly get to polling places if machines go down.

Nelson said there had been some issues with the postal service returning absentee ballots to voters instead of the elections office, but the office had ensured that the voters who reached out were able to get their ballots in. Following a recent meeting with other election offices and the state’s election division, they made the decision to move the voter information sticker to a different location in an attempt to keep the mixup from happening again.

Nelson said they haven’t had a voter notify the office of an issue since, and to her knowledge it only affected less than 10 ballots out of more than 1,400 mailed out.

Voters can also call the elections office to request an outer envelope to return their ballot in.

Voters in Smith County can vote at five locations during early voting, and will have 35 polling places available on election day. Voters do not have to vote within their precinct in Smith County.

Early voting runs through Friday, Feb. 28. Winners of their party’s primary will appear on the ballot in the November General Election.

If no candidate in a contested race secures more than 50% of the vote, the race will then head to a May 26 Runoff Election between the top two vote-getters.

Voters do not need to register with a party to vote in the primary, but must be a registered voter in that county and can only vote in one party’s primary.

Polling hours

for voting

— Feb. 18-21: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

— Saturday, Feb. 22: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

— Sunday, Feb. 23: noon to 5 p.m.

— Feb. 24-28: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Early voting locations

— The Hub: 304 E. Ferguson St., Tyler

— Heritage Building: 1900 Bellwood Road, Tyler

— Noonday Community Center: 16662 County Road 196, Tyler

— First Methodist Church-Lindale: 402 W. Hubbard St., Lindale

— Whitehouse Municipal Court: 311 E. Main St, Whitehouse