Long lines wrap around blocks in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. Election clerks receive a flood of absentee ballots earlier and in higher volume in states like Florida, New Jersey and Wisconsin. Americans are voting early in record numbers this year, and this is what it looks like.

As of Oct. 15, more than 17 million people have already cast their ballots in the 2020 election, according to the U.S. Elections Project . That would total 12% of the 138 million Americans who voted in 2016. But most election experts anticipate record voter turnout in this election year.

This flood of ballots will quickly turn into a tsunami as American voters possibly turn out at the highest rate since 18-20-year-olds got the right to vote in 1971.

Its just very different from any other presidential election that any of us have witnessed, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There are several forces coming together to make this happen.

The record early voter turnout is not just a reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, but a result of a confluence of events.

First, election experts predicted in 2019 that there would be high turnout as voters paid an unprecedented amount of attention to the election so early in the election calendar. Catalist, a Democratic Party voter data firm, predicted in a 2019 paper that there would be another historic level of turnout in 2020 after 2018s record midterm election turnout. The conservative pollster Public Opinion Strategies warned Republicans in a 2019 PowerPoint presentation of upcoming record turnout that would be far more diverse than in past elections.