ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Orange County has seen a record number of voters turn out for the first several days of early voting, according to the Supervisor of Elections Glen Gilzean.

County officials want voters to keep up that momentum and encourage residents to utilize the vote-by-mail option to avoid long lines and wait times.

Thursday, Oct. 24, is the last day to request a mail-in ballot, which has to be submitted to the Supervisor of Elections office by 5 p.m.

Gilzean said the elections office pays for the postage on mail-in ballots. He explained that they use a software called BallotTrax to inform voters on when their ballot is received, when it’s processed and if there is an issue that needs to be corrected.

“I call it Amazon on steroids. It lets you know when we’ve mailed out your ballot. It lets you know when we’ve received it, and let’s say God forbid the signature is off for whatever reason, then it will give that person an alert via text message, email and phone call,” said Gilzean.

Currently, there are 839,778 registered-active voters in Orange County, and 173,484 voters have already requested mail-in ballots.

While in-person voters are showing record breaking participation, officials said vote-by-mail ballots are seeing great turnouts as well.

“We’ve also seen some record numbers there,” he said. “There’s a total of 165,000 people who have signed up for vote-by-mail and we’ve received just under 62,000 of those ballots back. They haven’t been processed yet, but they have been returned.”

Once voters receive their vote-by-mail ballot, they can fill it out and place it back in the mail or drop it off at any of the 22-early voting sites open through Nov. 3.

If voters miss the opportunity to return their vote-by-mail ballot during early voting, they can exchange their mail-in ballot for an in-person ballot on Election Day, Nov. 5, at a designated polling place.