Early voting is reaching such proportions that some Georgia polls could be “ghost towns” on Election Day

STONE MOUNTAIN – Flags telling people to “Vote Here” flew not only in English, but also in Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity building as a steady stream passed through its doors to cast their ballots from 2024.

One by one, the voters who showed up Thursday added to what has become a the colossal pile of advance ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, which ended Friday, was so robust that nearly 4 million ballots could be cast before Election Day on Tuesday.

“Normally I try to vote early because I’m a mailman and it’s hard to get here on an election day,” said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump on Thursday before scattering leaves as he left with his red truck. truck.

Voters like King are part of the reason early voting records they were destroyed not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds like North Carolina, but even in states without major down-ballot contests like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the 2020 pandemic, then-Pres Donald Trump they criticized early voting and postal voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election. In 2022, after falsely blaming the 2020 loss on early voting, he continued.

In both elections, Republicans steered clear of early voting, preferring to do so on Election Day. This year, Trump did emphasized early voting and his supporters respond. So far, Republicans have flooded the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. Although they also increased their postal voting, it was at a much slower rate.

“The Trump effect is real,” said Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections, a conservative group that focuses on election politics.

So far, about 64 million people have voted in the 2024 election, which is more than a third of the total number of people who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do, the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democrat, according AP election data.

Early voting data, of course, doesn’t tell you who will win the election. It doesn’t tell you who voters support, just basic demographics and sometimes party affiliation. One demographic may seem unusually energized as it dominates early voting, only to have no more voters show up on Election Day.

Campaigns encourage early voting because it allows them to “bank” their most reliable supporters, freeing up resources to become less likely supporters on Election Day.

“I pretty much thought of the idea of ​​going back to Election Day as trying to put toothpaste back in a tube,” Snead said.

Election officials say early voting is racking up impressive totals. In North Carolina, all but two of the 25 western counties most affected by Hurricane Helene at the end of September are reporting higher in-person voter turnout compared to 2020.

Statewide, more than 3.7 million people had cast early in-person ballots by Friday morning, surpassing the early in-person total for all of 2020, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said. Early in-person voting ends Saturday afternoon in the state.

“Hurricane Helene didn’t stop us from voting,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board’s executive director and top voting official in that swing state. She added that voters were grateful and “we’re seeing a lot of civility.”

In Georgia, so many people voted early that a state election official says there could be a “ghost town” at the polls on Election Day.

There is no doubt that some of this is due to Trump. Big signs at his rallies read “VOTE EARLY!” and others also pushed Republicans to vote before Tuesday, even by mail.

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

Tona Barnes is a person who listened to this message. Instead of voting on Election Day, she voted early for the first time Thursday in the north Atlanta suburb of Marietta.

“He keeps putting it out there for early voting,” 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 she voted early “to save time.”

“I think on election day the line will be long,” said Arega, who owns an import business. “It will be discouraging.”

Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said Wednesday that the state has already reached two-thirds of all voter turnout in the 2020 election, as 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’ve had less than a million submissions during COVID in 2020, with all pre-Election Day voting uses.”

Almost as many have voted early by this date in 2020 in Georgia, but the turnout pattern was different. For a brief period during the pandemic, Georgia allowed voters to request ballots online without submitting a form with a handwritten signature and allowed counties to set up many drop-off boxes. But fueled by Trump’s insistence that he had been deceivedRepublican lawmakers only allowed directly limited boxes moving forward imposed new deadlines for postal vote requests and returned to requesting a hand-signed absentee request form.

That law and others in Georgia led to cries that Republicans would trying to suppress votes. Republicans said solid early voter turnout in 2024 proves otherwise.

“I think that gives the lie to the idea that having fairly basic security measures somehow deters people from voting,” said Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

But Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, refutes these claims, saying that the recent battles over the rules of the State Election Commission, which ended in a judge who throws out the rulesprove that Republicans are preparing to doom the legitimacy of any vote they don’t win in Georgia.

“I think there’s no question that these people have tried to muddy the waters a little bit to have something to potentially point to down the road,” Olasanoye said.

Republicans are buoyed by turnout in heavily GOP counties, which in some cases approach two-thirds of active voters. By Thursday, about 39 percent of voters in the majority-black Democratic stronghold of Augusta-Richmond County had cast ballots, while nearly 54 percent of voters in the neighboring Republican suburb of Columbia County had cast ballots.

“Just from a win-loss standpoint, the more votes I put in the bank by Friday, the fewer votes I have to take to the polls on Tuesday to win,” McKoon said.

Olasanoye, however, expressed confidence that Harris is building his coalition and will still win.

“Democrats and vice president, we’re just doing well,” he said.