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A record number of early votes were cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents went to the polls in a critical battleground state grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and controversial changes to election administration that have led to a flood of lawsuits .

More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, said Gabe Sterling of the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office

The previous first-day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.

The swing state is one of the most closely watched elections this election. Former President Donald Trump is trying to recapture it after narrowly losing to President Joe Biden there four years ago, which led to Trump and his allies unsuccessfully pushing to overturn his defeat.

Those efforts have been significant this year as new changes to the way the state conducts elections were approved by Republican members of the state’s election board, prompting Democrats and others to mount legal challenges many have not yet been resolved, even as Election Day approaches.

Despite Tuesday’s large turnout, the process appeared to go more smoothly this year for some Atlanta-area voters who spoke to CNN.

“The last time I voted, I voted in the city and the lines were out the door. They only had like, maybe three people working,” Corine Canada said. “So, honestly, people just started leaving because that’s what it was. Yeah, like, ‘That’s too long.’ I can’t sit here (and) wait, I have to get back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy.”

Parts of the state continue to recover from Hurricane Helene, which hit the U.S. last month and wreaked havoc in several other states in the Southeast. Election officials in Georgia say mail-in ballots were sent as planned by the U.S. Postal Service and were not affected by the storm.

“So far we have seen just over 250,000 voters request absentee ballots. “We may see a spike to 300,000 in the next week or so — and we expect probably about 5-6% of all voters to cast their absentee ballots this cycle,” Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on Tuesday.

Experts say some new state laws that tightened rules for absentee voting and limited the availability of drop boxes may make that option less attractive than early in-person voting.

While many drop boxes were available 24 hours a day in 2020, there will be fewer of them this year, and they will be located at election offices or early voting locations, whose hours tend to be similar to regular business hours.

It is also possible that the state could continue to see high levels of early voting, as Georgia law now requires two Saturdays of early voting and allows two Sundays of early voting if a county requests it.

Raffensperger said Tuesday that security precautions have been put in place to ensure a safe election and that officials are not only auditing each race but also randomly checking voting equipment to inspect it.

“Pulling out a device, doing a random audit on election day, bringing it into headquarters and then verifying that it’s recording the votes correctly and that it hasn’t been hacked by any malicious actors out there,” Raffensperger told reporters.

Raffensperger, who was in Trump’s crosshairs after the 2020 election, recertified the results after a statewide machine recount in December 2020 that confirmed Biden defeated Trump by just 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast in the Peach State.

Meanwhile, the state’s judges are considering a set of new rules passed by the Trump-backed Republican majority on the State Election Board that Democrats warn could spark “chaos” in Georgia after the election.

After a marathon court hearing on Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney paused a rule that would have required officials to hand-count the number of ballots cast at each polling place, criticizing the state’s election officials for doing so they had approved it so close to election day. That rule will come under scrutiny from another state judge on Wednesday as part of cases brought against it by state and national Democrats and civil rights groups.

McBurney is also still considering a separate rule the board approved in August that would require local election officials to conduct a “reasonable investigation” of election results before certifying them – a mandate that Democrats say could give county election officials broad authority to delay the election or refuse to certify the results altogether “in search of alleged election irregularities.”

But McBurney sought to address any uncertainties surrounding certification this week with a ruling in which he said local election officials have “a compelling firm obligation to certify election results” in the days after the election – a blow to a GOP The election official who did this had asked him to rule that their duties related to certification were “discretionary.”

Election official explains when they will know if Trump or Harris won the GA

In line at an Atlanta-area precinct, two voters who identified as Democrats said they would vote for Harris to avoid the “chaos” they said was surrounding Trump.

“It is important that we vote today simply because we want to prevent as much chaos as possible because Donald Trump has proven himself to be the most evil, uneducated and racist person we have ever met,” said Fay Ainsworth.

“Well, we have a crazy person running for president and a very competent young woman opposing him,” said Joseph Henry King Jr., 77.

Kareem Rosshandler, 32, who describes himself as an independent, said he voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to send a message to Democrats about their support for Israel in the war with Hamas.

“We’ve been calling for an arms embargo for a year and they haven’t responded, and all the protests and posters won’t matter if we don’t get that message where it really counts, which is on the…” ballot.”

“I mean, the Greens want to abolish the Electoral College,” Rosshandler added. “And I think that’s fantastic because right now we have a two-party system and the only thing worse is a one-party system and we’re not far away from that.”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

CNN’s Mounira Elsamra contributed to this report.