For weeks, Georgia’s Democratic and Republican parties had urged voters to cast their ballots as soon as possible instead of waiting until Election Day. Voters apparently listened.
More than 1 million Georgians have voted early, a dramatic increase from the last midterm election in 2018 and nearly on pace with the 2020 presidential election,Early-voting centers opened across Georgia last week, and the vast majority of voters cast their ballots in person. Mail-in-ballot requests have fallen significantly from past election cycles.
Early voting is underway in several other states, although most of them don’t release as much data as Georgia.In Virginia, more than 411,000 people have voted so far, surpassing the total number of people who voted early in 2018, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. In Georgia, about 17 percent of the voters who cast their ballots early had previously waited to vote
the “extraordinary turnout” while arguing that “suppression is about barriers. If those barriers are not completely successful, the credit does not go to those who erected the barriers. The credit goes to those voters who found a way to navigate, overwhelm and overcome those barriers.”