After hours-long waits at polls and problems with absentee ballots plagued the June primary, D.C.’s election officials were skating on thin ice. Faced with calls for their resignation, they could have played it safe and just reverted back to the time-tested system of neighborhood-based polling places — albeit with lots more social distancing and hand sanitizer. (That’s what Mayor Muriel Bowser was pushing for.)

Instead, the D.C. Board of Elections doubled down on mail-in voting, announcing that, for the first time ever, every registered voter would get a ballot in the mail. It was a surprising gamble, even more so considering the repeated claims election officials made earlier this year that building a full vote-by-mail system like those in Oregon and Washington state could take as long as a decade.

But it seems to have been a gamble that paid off.

By Election Day, voters had returned more than 201,000 mail ballots. (Voters could return absentee ballots through the U.S. Postal Service or in one of 55 ballot drop boxes placed throughout the city.) To put that 201,000 figure in context, that’s 10 times the amount of absentee ballots returned during the 2016 election, and more than twice as many as during the June primary, when voters were asked to request absentee ballots to vote by mail.

All told, absentee voting during the lead-up to the November election outpaced in-person voting in D.C. — both early and on Election Day — two to one. The option was so widely used that Election Day voting itself also seemed like an oversight: roughly 20,000 people voted that day, a fraction of the usual numbers. (In 2016, it was more than 186,000.) With most votes now counted, the elections board reports that 63% of ballots came in the mail or via drop box — and represented more than half of all votes in seven of the city’s eight wards.

“We’re taking a sigh of relief,” says Alice Miller, the director of the elections board, of how what’s now known as “election month” played out.

Miller says the city’s 55 ballot drop boxes proved most popular for voters, as was another innovation used during this cycle: the super vote center. Those were the six large-scale polling places meant to accommodate a higher number of voters while maintaining social distance. The one at Nationals Park was the most popular, with 6,468 voters choosing to cast ballots there. That’s roughly twice the number of people who voted at the Capital One Arena, another super vote center.

“All of those worked very well and people liked going there,” says Miller, adding that she’d like to see the super vote centers used again.

That’s not to say there weren’t hiccups — and criticisms.

Some voters said they never even got a ballot in the mail, while some reported getting ballots for people who had long moved away. Others had trouble getting in touch with election officials to have their questions answered. And some said they had concerns with how long their ballots were marked as being under review after they were submitted.

“I think the other issue was just understanding the status of your ballot. There were a lot of questions about your ballot status in the ballot tracker,” says At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, who after the June primary had called on the elections board’s leadership to resign.

Miller agrees that the new ballot tracker could be confusing for voters, though it was a significant upgrade from the one used during the primary — which in many cases never even updated to tell a voter their ballot had been received.

“I think a lesson we can learn from other jurisdictions is when the ballots come in, what their answer is and what terms they use to allow voters to know the status of their mail ballots,” she says.

The system of reporting results on Election Day also prompted confusion, largely because the board’s first report of results included only a fraction of the absentee votes, leading some races to remain unsettled until the following day. “That needs to be improved,” says Silverman. (Unlike in some states, where election officials weren’t able to begin counting absentee ballots until polls closed on Election Day, D.C.’s board could start as soon as ballots were received.)

While the At-Large councilmember says the November election cycle was “fairly successful,” she still believes that Miller and board chairman Michael Bennett should make way for new leadership. “I will just say that the lack of transparency and honest answers after the June primary remains inexcusable,” she says.

Miller says that she’s currently focused on making sure remaining votes get counted — any ballot postmarked on Election Day will be counted provided it is received by Nov. 13 — and conducting the usual post-election audit, a process that will take her staff through at least Thanksgiving.