Will high early voting leave Ga. polls a ‘ghost town’ on Election Day?

AUGUSTA, Ga. - Early voting records have been shattered in Georgia. On Election Day, can we expect long lines or will polling locations be a “ghost town,” as one election official suggests?

In Richmond County, about 42% of the eligible voters have voted, including advance and absentee voters. That included 51,576 early voters and 4,081 absentee ballots returned, according to Richmond County Board of Elections Executive Director Travis Doss.

In Georgia, 4,004,588 voters have cast ballots either by voting early or absentee by mail. With 55.3% turnout, Georgians cast 3,761,968 ballots during early voting, and 242,620 ballots by mail.

As of Saturday morning, 92 Georgia counties had exceeded 50% turnout, a figure unprecedented in Georgia history.

During early voting in 2018, there were 1,890,364 voters who cast ballots. 2,697,822 cast ballots in 2020, and 2,289,933 cast ballots in 2022.

“This was the most successful early voting period in Georgia history because voters trust the process,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. “Four years of progress brought us here. We’re battle-tested and ready, regardless of what the critics say. And we’re going to hold those who interfere in our elections able.”

There’s no doubt that part of the large turnout is due to GOP candidate Donald Trump. Large signs at his rallies spell out “VOTE EARLY!” and others have also been pushing Republicans to cast ballots before Tuesday, even by mail.

“This election is too important to wait!” proclaimed one flyer mailed to a voter in Georgia by the Elon Musk-funded America PAC. “President Trump is counting on patriots like you to apply for an absentee ballot and bank your vote today.”

Tona Barnes is one person who has heeded that message. Instead of voting on Election Day, she voted early for the first time on Thursday in the northern Atlanta suburb of Marietta.

“He keeps putting it out there to vote early,” she said of Trump.

Others in Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans, say they vote early for convenience.

Ashenafi Arega, who voted Thursday for Vice President Kamala Harris at the Mountain Park Activity Building in suburban Gwinnett County, said he cast a ballot early “to save time.”

“I think on Election Day the line will be long,” said Arega, who owns an importing business. “It will be discouraging.”

Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said Wednesday that the state already had hit two-thirds of the entire turnout for the 2020 election, when Georgia set a record number of nearly 5 million votes cast.

“There’s a possibility it could be a ghost town on Election Day,” Sterling said. “We had less than a million show up during COVID in 2020 with all the uses of pre-Election Day voting.”

Nearly as many people had voted early by this time in 2020 in Georgia, but the turnout pattern was different. For a brief time during the pandemic, Georgia allowed voters to request mail ballots online without sending in a form with a hand-inked signature, and allowed counties to set up many drive-through drop boxes. But fueled by Trump’s insistence that he had been cheated, Republican lawmakers allowed only sharply limited drop boxes going forward, imposed new deadlines on mail ballot requests and went back to requiring a hand-signed absentee request form.

That law and others in Georgia led to cries that Republicans were trying to suppress votes. Republicans said 2024′s robust early turnout proves that isn’t so.

“I think that gives the lie to this idea that having some pretty basic security measures in place somehow discourages people from voting,” said Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

But Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, discounts those statements, saying recent fights about State Election Board rules, which ended with a judge throwing out the rules, prove Republicans are preparing to decry the legitimacy of any vote they don’t win in Georgia.

“I think there is no doubt that these folks were trying to muck up the waters a little bit to have something to point to potentially down the road,” Olasanoye said.

Republicans are thrilled with the turnout in heavily GOP counties, which in some cases is approaching two-thirds of active voters. Through Thursday, about 39% of voters in the majority Democratic stronghold of Augusta-Richmond County had cast ballots, while nearly 54% of voters in the neighboring Republican suburb of Columbia County had voted.

What will you need to bring to vote?

Voters need to show any one of these photo IDs at the polls:

• Any valid state or federal government-issued photo ID, including a free ID card issued by your county registrar’s office or the Georgia Department of Driver Services.
• Georgia driver’s license, even if expired.
• Valid employee photo ID from any branch, department, agency, or entity of the U.S. government, Georgia, or any county, municipality, board, authority or other entity of the state.
• Valid U.S. port ID.
• Valid U.S. military photo ID containing a photograph of the voter.
• Student photo ID card issued by a Georgia public college, university, or technical school.
• Valid tribal photo ID containing your photograph.

Voters unable to provide photo identification can vote through a provisional ballot. They will need to provide a copy of their ID within three days after the election to their county board of elections and registration.

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