If the early voting numbers are any indicator, get ready for a huge turnout on Super Tuesday.

In state after March 1 state, election officials are reporting increases in the number of voters who cast their ballot before election day. Alabama, Arkansas, Massachusetts -- to name just a few -- report upticks in absentee ballots and voter registration. In at least two of the 12 states voting Tuesday, Georgia and Tennessee, election officials report dramatic surges that have blown past previous records.


"We are seeing an upsurge. In the last couple of election cycles we've seen about 100,000 people early vote. Through yesterday, we've had about 120,000 already. And we've got today, tomorrow and Monday still," Chris Powell, a spokesman in the Arkansas secretary of state's office, said Friday.

The numbers vary but the story is similar in many of the Super Tuesday states -- voters seem primed to come out in large numbers and are eager to vote earlier in 2016.

So far this year, the real action has been on the Republican side. The Iowa GOP caucuses blew through past records and the Nevada GOP reported more than twice as many voters participated in the caucuses Tuesday as in 2012. The New Hampshire and South Carolina GOP primaries also saw higher turnout this year than in 2012.

The contours of the presidential primary season, where there are competitive nomination battles in both parties, appear to be a key driver. Seventeen GOP presidential candidates at the beginning of the cycle meant lots of Republicans were all pushing supporters to take an active role in 2016. The excitement generated by real estate mogul Donald Trump on the right, and Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left, has also powered interest in the presidential race.

In Oklahoma -- where the Sanders campaign reported a crowd of 6,900 attended a recent rally -- State Election Board spokesman Bryan Dean noted a larger-than-usual wave of voters coming to vote early or mail absentee ballots.

"If you look at just the absentee mail ballots, we've already eclipsed what we had in 2012 by a couple thousand," Dean said. "We had 12,500 as of yesterday. Which was a couple thousand over what we had in 2012. I should mention our turnout in 2012 was fairly low for the presidential primary."

In-person early voting is also set to outpace 2012, Dean said, while pointing out that many of Oklahoma's smaller counties did not have hard data yet.

"So just in terms of in-person absentee yesterday we had at least 9,500 yesterday," he said. "In 2012 we had, I think it was, 15,000 for the whole three-day voting period."

In Texas, after 10 days of early voting, 826,323 Texans in 15 counties had voted (it's not possible to collect daily totals for all 254 counties in the state, according to the Texas secretary of state's office).



"This is a record number of voters who have cast a ballot at the 10-day mark of primary voting. Today, day 11, is the last day of early voting," Alicia Pierce, the secretary of state’s communications director, said Friday.

In Sanders’ home state of Vermont, where the senator is expected to romp Tuesday, there’s been an uptick in absentee ballot requests.

"We've had about 22,200 absentee requests. About 15,700 of those are on the Democratic side and 6,500 on the Republican side," Will Senning, the director of elections and campaign finance in the Vermont secretary of state's office said, noting there are still a few days to go. Four years ago, there were less than 14,000 absentee ballot requests in total.

Many of the election officials said the early voting enthusiasm seemed tipped toward the Republican side for Super Tuesday.

"About 60-40 so far," said Arkansas’ Powell, referring to the party affiliation of early voters.

The story appeared to be similar in neighboring Oklahoma.

"I mean about 20,000 of the 30,000 net increase that we've had in the last couple weeks were Republicans. And Independents and Democrats were about 5,000 each," said Dean. "We have seen a massive surge of Republican voters just in the last few weeks before the election."

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said early voting had only been "moderate" except for high numbers in the Black Belt, a region originally named for the color of its topsoil and also home to a majority of African-Americans.

"It's about moderate except in some of our Black Belt counties and we've had some reports of some occurrences that may require some level of investigation which we are conducting," Merrill told POLITICO. "Considering the fact that we have 10,000 people in a county and we've had requests for 1,000 absentee ballots, that's a problem. So we're investigating what's happening at the local level. I dispatched a team to one county earlier this week and have another team that's about to leave in about 15 minutes to see what's happening."