The count continues: More than 77 percent of votes processed in Washington

SEATTLE - Historically high early voter turnout is fueling robust election results, but there are still hundreds of thousands of ballots that still need to be processed in Washington state. 

RELATED: 2020 Election Results for Washington State and US President

King County Elections officials said they would normally have a lot more ballots to count the morning after, but a lot of people voted early this year, either by mail or by ballot drop box. 

Statewide numbers showing nearly 3.8 million ballots have been processed so far - about 77.4 percent of registered voters in the state. 

“It almost felt like election day came about a week early in terms of the returns we saw," King County Elections Chief Of Staff Kendall Hodson says. "Typically we see over half of voters returning their ballot on Monday or Tuesday, and we came into Election Day with 75% of people already having returned their ballot.”

Election officials are scurrying to report results as quickly as possible, but it's worth noting that Washington state has the latest deadline for ballot counting. Ballots that were postmarked by 8 p.m. November 3 can be received through November 23 and still be counted.

“We’ll keep counting in the days ahead, typically we have a pretty good idea of all the races by Friday and the majority of ballots counted," Hodson says. "That said, we don’t certify the results until November 24th so that gives lots of time for those out of state ballots to come in, and for folks who might have had an issue with their signature to resolve that.”

The next release of election results will happen at 4 p.m. Wednesday.