But when you consider that Americans were electing on November 6th not just the president but 435 congressmen and 33 senators in a vast country of 330m people, where electioneering is primarily conducted by paid television advertisements, the figure may not seem quite so high.
It is a very different kind of democratic process than in primary states, where overt electioneering is kept at a distance from the actual voting.
The place where outside electioneering is a bigger problem is in the City Council races, where smaller-bore contests among lesser-known candidates have been swamped by the spending of one group, with the vaguely positive, positively vague name Jobs for New York.
In the main square of Le Val Fourré, the Muslim quarter of Mantes-la-Jolie, where an electioneering President Jacques Chirac was spat upon by youths earlier this year, few women are to be seen, and in the café the people drinking mint tea are all men.That is not to say that all women are subjugated.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that a judge halted electioneering outside of one polling place where Republicans were reportedly standing outside a voting location and asking people to show photo ID, saying it "could have a chilling effect" on voting.
Election commission data on electioneering spending may offer a glimpse of the future, though.
Blair is starting his electioneering at a medical centre in Harrow, north London, where one of the first things he did was to get his blood pressure checked.
Electioneering has taken a dark twist in northwest Pakistan, where a concerted campaign of Taliban attacks against the main secular party is violently reshaping the democratic landscape before parliamentary elections scheduled for May 11.
Because on Thursday afternoon, in an attempt to spread some truth and cut through the election's propaganda, a couple of concerned citizens printed off copies of my article and began handing them out at New Cross station, where Ray was doing some last minute electioneering.
8.47am: Electioneering is well under way over in north-east London, where Tessa Jowell, the London minister, turned up with Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, to mark the completion of the first phase of the extended East London line in an event at Dalston Junction.
