The official election day, October 17, may still be a week away but early voters were out in force again today.
As of last night more than 700,000 people had cast their ballot, and the Electoral Commission expected another 300,000 to vote today.
A total of half a million people are estimated to take to the polls this weekend.
At one site in central Wellington today, queues were out the door.
Those turning out to vote across the country offered a range of reasons for their advanced voting.
"It's better to beat the rush,” one said. "It's just convenient, it's right there," another voter added.
"I didn't want to forget!" another said.
"The last election we had about 47 per cent of people vote early," the Electoral Commission's Graeme Astle said. "We'd anticipated maybe 60 per cent this time, but current trends would suggest it's going to be more than that.
"By the end of the weekend we could have had a third of eligible voters voting. If we get those numbers over this weekend we're likely to surpass the whole of 2017 by the beginning of the week."
Last Saturday, 450 voting sites were open, but that's been tripled today to 1350 to help cater to demand.
"Around 700 of those are schools that have opened over the weekend... We're really trying to get out and get into the communities to give people the access they need to make it easy to go and vote,” Astle said.
Tomorrow, 850 voting sites will be open.
Auckland University's Lara Greaves, a voting behaviours expert, said, "It's incredibly exciting to see such high voter turnout early on".
“The Electoral Commission and the parties themselves have done a great job in signalling it's OK to vote early get it done."
For some, the coronavirus was at the front of their mind.
"Older people or people with health conditions especially, but generally more people just want to get it done, get it out of the way just in case there might be some other outbreak or just because they do want to avoid crowds or queues,” Greaves said.
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