More than half a million people in Georgia who didn’t vote in the presidential election four years ago cast a ballot this month during early voting, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and GeorgiaVotes.com.
As of Wednesday morning, those 613,000 voters include new residents, Georgians who weren’t old enough to vote four years ago, as well as residents who have moved back after a time living in other states and voters who were registered for decades but just skipped 2020.
“We think of the electorate as being really static,” said Bernard Fraga, a political scientist at Emory University, referring to conversations about candidates winning back voters, “when the much bigger pool of people is not folks who are switching (parties), it’s folks who couldn’t have voted, didn’t vote or couldn’t have voted in previous years.”
At this point in time in 2020, more than 836,000 non-2016 voters had cast ballots prior to Election Day, accounting for about 1 out of every 4 voters then. Ultimately, 1.5 million voters who did not cast a ballot in 2016 did so in 2020, representing about 31% of all voters.
Fraga said the higher number of new voters in 2020 may be due, in part, to the record-high turnout that year and the higher share of mail-in ballots, which means some voters who cast a ballot earlier in that election may not have voted yet.
More than half the new voters this year are white. The next largest groups are Black voters and voters who marked “Other” when filling out their voter registration forms.
These voters are younger as well, with voters under 29 making up the largest age group. About 130,000 of these voters are 21 or younger and would likely have been too young to vote during the 2016 election. There are about 27,700 voters who are 18 years old.
Many of these voters have also participated in prior presidential elections in the state. These voters may have moved out of the state and returned or chosen not to vote in elections for years.
This story has been updated with data released Wednesday morning by the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office that reflects early and absentee voting as of Tuesday, Oct. 29.
