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RALEIGH (AP) - Thanks to the rain, or maybe the intensely focused efforts of campaign partisans, North Carolina's overall voter turnout wasn't quite as high as expected. But it was a record nonetheless.

Unofficial results from Tuesday's election show more than 68 percent of the nearly 6.3 million registered voters cast ballots during the state's two weeks of early voting and on Election Day.

More than half of the votes were cast during early voting, driven by excitement about the presidential race - particularly President-elect Barack Obama's several appearance in North Carolina during the primary and fall campaigns.

"It's wonderful. It's much larger that what had been expected earlier in the year," said Bob Hall, research director for Democracy North Carolina, a campaign finance and voting reform group based in Chapel Hill. "Clearly, the early voting enthusiasm carried the day."

The 4,293,645 people reported voting could increase by tens of thousands after all provisional ballots are counted, state elections director Gary Bartlett. That could bring the turnout close to 70 percent, he said.

The best turnout in recent history was 69 percent in 1984, when President Reagan won his second term in office and Sen. Jesse Helms and former Gov. Jim Hunt held their epic Senate race.

The raw number of voters smashed the record of 3.5 million set four years ago. Hall said he estimated 900,000 new people registered to vote this year, including for early voting.

Elections officials had projected a turnout of 4.6 million votes based on the 2.6 million people that swarmed voting locations in a 2 1/2-week period before Election Day. But long lines on Election Day largely didn't materialize.

Bartlett had revised his projections down to 4.5 million. "I don't know what happened to the other 200,000," he said.

"It seemed like (turnout) was heavy in the morning, steady through lunch and, all of a sudden, anybody who wanted to could go anywhere without any problems," he said.

Hall said he thought the bad weather - up to an inch of rain fell in some parts of the state - dampened turnout. But election officials weren't sure.

"You have to remember that when it comes to grass-roots efforts, (the organizers) are only interested in the supporters of theirs," Bartlett said. "We might have seen both sides just concentrating on their core turnout."

Forsyth County elections chairman Eric Elliot said people, and not precipitation, were the deciding factor in the turnout levels.

"If we didn't get you energized to vote this year, I don't know when we'll ever get you energized," he said.

There were few reported problems with voting on Election Day. Rockingham County discovered 18,000 uncounted votes Wednesday from five one-stop polling sites. In Wake County, where voting hours were extended at one voting place because an election judge's relative drove away with clean ballots in his trunk, things otherwise went through without a hitch.

"It went very smoothly," Wake elections director Cherie Poucher said, adding that she was able to leave her office by 10:15 p.m. "I got to watch the 11 p.m. news."

The largely error-free balloting comes in the first presidential election since North Carolina passed a 2005 law streamlining voting machines and requiring them to generate a paper record of every vote cast. The law followed the loss of more than 4,400 electronic ballots in Carteret County during the November 2004 election, leaving the fate of one statewide race in doubt for two months.

"North Carolina's elections system has been tested and proven with the strains of a record election," said Joyce McCloy with the N.C. Coalition for Verified Voting, a past critic of the state's voting equipment.

Associated Press writers Mike Baker and Barbara Rodriguez contributed to this report.