Michiganders took full advantage of new voting laws this year, registering to vote in droves in the days before Tuesday’s presidential primary and flooding clerks' offices with absentee ballots.

At the end of the day Monday, nearly 1 million people — 993,814 to be exact — had asked for absentee ballots now that anyone can choose that option to vote. That represents a 97% increase over 2016 and is approaching absentee ballot totals in the general election of 2016 when far more people turn out to vote.

Of that total, 804,216 people had returned their ballots, a 60% increase over 2016 when 446,944 people had voted by absentee at this point of the election cycle. Since voters could return their absentee ballots to their local clerk until 8 p.m. Tuesday, a final tally of the number of absentee ballots used this year won't be available until Wednesday.

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And by the 4 p.m. Monday deadline, 36,574 people had spoiled their absentee ballots, primarily because they had voted for a candidate who had dropped out of the race, and cast a new vote for one of the presidential hopefuls still in the race.

Another provision of Proposal 3, which voters overwhelmingly passed in 2018, was that Michigan residents could register to vote up to and on Election Day. In the last 14 days, when people had to go to their local clerk’s office to register, a total of 13,909 people had registered to vote, including 7,198 who registered by 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. The deluge contributed to longer lines to vote, especially in college towns.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called the Election Day numbers a new day for democracy in Michigan.

“More than 13,000 people registered and voted today, with nearly half that number, just over 6,000, doing so after 4:30 p.m. today," she said. "We don’t have the data yet, but we expect that many of these people were young, first-time voters. It’s a great thing.”

Since the law passed, one-third of the people voting in the days before elections have been 18 or 19, said Jake Rollow, spokesman for the Secretary of State.

Long lines of people registering to vote were happening in many college towns in the state, Rollow said, including East Lansing; Ann Arbor; Kalamazoo, home to Western Michigan University, and Allendale. where Grand Valley State University is located.

At 3 p.m. Tuesday, a long line snaked through the East Lansing City Clerk's office and it was almost entirely MSU students waiting to either register to vote or casting ballots for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

“He cares about people of color,” said Peyton Burchfield, 20, of St. Joseph, an economics sophomore who had been waiting in line about 15 minutes with his friend Ayushi Patel, 20, of Kalamazoo, a sophomore studying psychology.

Before the new law, people couldn’t register to vote in the 30 days before an election.

Secretary of State staffers who fanned out across the state to check on polling places reported few problems, Rollow said, including some precincts that didn’t open exactly at 7 a.m. or others that didn’t have adequate signage to mark the voting locations.

One of the things the SOS will be assessing is how local clerks staffed up to accommodate the surge in absentee voting. Clerks couldn’t begin processing or tabulating absentee ballots until the polls opened at 7 a.m.

“One of the things we’re going to be tracking today are jurisdictions that have staffed themselves as they did in the general election of 2016. They will have a better ability to handle the absentee ballots and same day registrations that they get today,” Rollow said. “There are more than 1,500 jurisdictions across the state and we’re hoping that many of them have staffed themselves more toward what they had in the general election of 2016.”

In Detroit, for example,hundreds of poll workers were able to get through more than 30,500 absentee ballots they received before Tuesday's election well before the polls closed Tuesday night.

"There are jurisdictions that are staffed up," Rollow said. "And they seem to be doing quite well and are working quite efficiently through the absentee ballots."

Benson on Tuesday night had particular praise for local clerks, who dealt with the huge surge in absentee ballots without help from the // Legislature, which declined to vote on bills that would have eased the burden on clerks. As a result, full, official results still aren't expected until Wednesday afternoon.

Clerks' “workload was significantly increased by the fact that our Legislature did not allow them to begin processing absentee ballots prior to this morning, and their offices are still registering voters who were in line at 8 p.m. today … so for this reason, we do not expect to see a full picture of our election until tomorrow afternoon.”

Staff writer Darcie Moran contributed to this report.

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.