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GREENSBORO — The result of every race but one in Guilford County was accurately predicted by early-voting results released as polls closed Election Day.

As an exit poll, those figures proved more dead-on than many of the ways that politicians, media companies and the public use to find out whether their candidate won while waiting for precinct reports that can take hours to log.

Early-voting totals were posted Tuesday shortly after polls closed at 7:30 p.m.. Nearly four hours later, at 11:18 p.m., all the county's precincts were tallied.

The only result that had flipped: Robert Edmunds defeated Suzanne Reynolds in a neck-and-neck race for Supreme Court associate justice.

The early-voting accuracy is supported by a heavy turnout. Early voters made up 61 percent of the total votes cast in Guilford County, and accounted for 42 percent of total registered voters, so it's no surprise that those ballots cast between Oct. 16 and Nov. 1 had a massive impact.

Or that those ballots broke heavily Democratic.

The only Republican who won in Guilford County Tuesday was Howard Coble, whose district includes the southern, more rural parts of the county.

"Democrats have historically concentrated on getting their folks to vote before Election Day," said Johnnie McClean, deputy director of the State Board of Elections. "And I think the concentrated effort they made this year would appear to be visible in the election results."

A Democratic emphasis on straight-ticket voting, tantamount to their early-vote message, heavily tipped the scales in the party's favor here. More than 242,000 voted here, and 91,566 of those were straight-ticket Democrats.

Of course, it must be mentioned that Guilford County leans Democratic in its registrations anyway. There are roughly 176,000 registered Democrats, compared to about 103,000 Republicans.

But what do those early voting results mean for the future? Tough to say.

"It's something that's relatively new," said Hunter Bacot, director of the Elon University Poll, said about early voting. "It's not been studied much, and it's a little bit more difficult to study."

The big early-voting totals could have come from a large number of tight races in North Carolina.

"Anytime you have a highly contested, salient race in the state, you see those numbers tick up. And you look at turnout in North Carolina, it is very good," Bacot said.

What most know as early voting is actually a variation on absentee voting made possible through a change in North Carolina law from 2000 that said voters didn't need an excuse to ask for an absentee ballot. Counties across the state took that opportunity to open the polls earlier and longer.

For Guilford, 2008 was its biggest early-voting year. In 2000, the county had about 35,000 early voters. That pretty much doubled in the next presidential election in 2004 and then roughly doubled again this year.

But that early vote total appears unlikely to double again.

If the percentage of early voters doubled again, it would be greater than 80 percent, a figure that some elections experts predicted the county might reach this year.

The county's record turnout for all voters, 68 percent, was hit but not broken Tuesday.

Rain showers might have kept some people home this year.

"In all honesty, I thought we'd be in the 70s," Bacot said.

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com