US election turnout shatters records on first day of voting in Georgia

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is already underway. Several states have launched early voting and voting by mail. On October 15, three weeks before the ballot on November 5, Georgia opened its polling stations. The turnout has smashed the figures from four years ago. “Spectacular,” said the chief operating officer in the Office of the Georgia Secretary of State, Gabriel Sterling, responsible for the electoral process. Among those who were able to cast their ballot when the polling stations opened was a very illustrious voter: former Democratic president Jimmy Carter, now 100 years old and in hospice care, who stated his desire to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris. Although there has been no confirmation from family members that Carter has done so, mail-in ballots began going out last week.

“As of 4pm we have crossed the quarter million mark with 251,899 votes cast. Spectacular turnout. We are running out of adjectives for this. Proud of our elections team, the counties great work, and most importantly, the voters doing their job and showing up,” Sterling tweeted with a meme underlining the “spectacular” part.

As voters lined up and cast their ballots, successive records were broken: by 1 p.m., 154,000 votes had already been cast, surpassing the 136,000 mark for the entire first day of early voting in the 2020 presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

By 3:30 p.m., the number of votes cast had reached 234,000. With that, Georgia voters surpassed all daily records for any early voting day in the 2022 legislative and statewide elections. “Our county election directors are outstanding, and Georgia voters are energized!” wrote Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, on X.

Aside from the mobilization of citizens, the increase in early in-person voting may be partly related to the additional difficulties imposed by the Georgia legislature on voting by mail. A new law has shortened application deadlines, imposed additional identification requirements, and limited the availability of ballot drop boxes.

Georgia is one of the decisive states in the presidential election. Of the seven states in which the two parties are most balanced, it holds the most votes (16) in the Electoral College, after Pennsylvania, and together with North Carolina.

Polls so far give the Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump, who held rally in Atlanta Tuesday, a slight lead, but within the margin of error. In 2020, after nearly five million voters cast their ballots, Biden won in Georgia by just 11,779 votes. He was the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1992. Trying to overturn the result at the polls, Trump pressured Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes in his favor. Raffensperger refused, stating that the results were correct.

Trump was later indicted in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the state’s capital and largest city, for alleged election-rigging attempts. Judge Scott F. McAfee, however, dismissed the specific charge for the call to Raffensperger, concluding that the allegation of soliciting a public official to violate his oath was not specific enough to meet the elements of the offense. McAfee left the door open for the prosecutor to re-file the charge at a later date. The call may also serve as evidence for some of the other crimes Trump has been charged with.

More than five million voters

Early voting and voting by mail are already underway in most states. According to data compiled Tuesday by The New York Times, more than 5.1 million citizens have already voted by mail. Some 55 million people have requested to cast their ballot in this way.

In the 2020 election, amid the coronavirus pandemic, many states made it easier to vote early, either in-person or by mail. Some, however, have passed laws restricting early voting over the past four years. In general, Democratic registered voters are much more likely to use early voting methods. In 2020, an estimated 60% of Biden supporters did so, compared with less than a third of Trump voters.

Trump has frequently criticized early voting, even linking it unfoundedly to electoral fraud, although lately he has been backtracking on that message — which was discouraging for his own voters — and urging Republicans to go to the polls as soon as possible.

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