Election officials are expecting high turnout Tuesday for North Carolina's primaries after early voting topped 2016 figures.

More than 11.2 percent of registered voters in the state cast ballots during the early voting period, up from about 10.5 percent during the primaries four years ago.

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Early voting started very slowly this year but picked up in the final days, with long lines of people waiting to vote Saturday afternoon, the final day of early voting.

"We do feel like that some folks were waiting to vote until after they saw what happened in some other states, like South Carolina on Saturday," state elections director Karen Brinson Bell said Monday. "So, we do think we’ll have some strong participation [Tuesday]."

Republican primary voters don’t have a competitive presidential race this year, but Democrats have lots of choices, which drove up the numbers of Democrats and unaffiliated voters who cast ballots early. Some 517,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, compared to just 274,000 who voted Republican.

That could mean a busy day at the polls Tuesday, according to Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College. In the 2016 primary, he said, a third of voters voted early, with two-thirds on Election Day.

"If that pattern holds, what we saw particularly on the Democratic side, a little over half a million votes cast early, we should get about a million votes [Tuesday] in the general primary day," Bitzer said.

Democrats will have three fewer choices for president after Tom Steyer, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out since Saturday night.

Bitzer said that's likely to help consolidate the center-left vote, which could hurt Bernie Sanders' chance of winning the state.

"Now that both Buttigieg and Klobuchar are out, it’s likely that their votes mostly would go to [Joe] Biden, but it could be some shifting within those as well," he said.

State election officials are a little concerned about the rainy forecast for Election Day, said Brinson Bell, who suggested that people vote during the day to avoid the rush before and after work.

Polls will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., and everyone in line at closing time will be allowed to vote.