As of Friday afternoon, the number of ballots cast before Election Day in Georgia has surpassed 50% of all ballots cast in the 2020 election.
Nearly 5 million Georgians voted for president in 2020. As of Friday, more than 2.5 million have already voted. The state’s early voting period ends Nov. 1.
This year’s turnout has largely been supported by early in-person voters rather than mail-in ballots. Voting by mail dominated the 2020 election.
This year’s massive turnout for early voting continues a trend away from casting ballots on Election Day. Detailed data lags by a day, but an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of voter participation through Thursday shows that 3 out of every 4 voters who have already cast a ballot this year voted early in 2020 as well.
Out of all registered voters in the state, 30% have cast a ballot in this year’s presidential election. At this point in 2020, 35% of voters had voted, but there are reasons why. Early, in-person voting started one day earlier in 2020, accounting for about 136,000 votes, and there are fewer drop boxes available to collect absentee ballots due to a voting law passed in 2021.
“Politics has become so compelling that walking around with your vote is almost like a burden,” said Audrey Haynes, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. She said that the strong early voting turnout reflects a lot of motivation but that it’s too soon to tell who will benefit from that motivation.
The state broke daily turnout records during the first week of early voting as 313,000 voters lined up at the polls and cast their ballots on the first day, compared with the 136,000 who voted on the first in-person early voting day in 2020.
In total, over 2.3 million voters have cast a ballot in person this year while roughly 1.6 million had voted in person by this date in 2020.
In addition to the more than 2 million in-person voters, more than 156,000 Georgians have cast absentee ballots. Absentee voting this year is much lower than in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged many to avoid in-person voting. More than 970,000 Georgians had returned an absentee ballot by the same time in the 2020 election.
Another possible reason for the drop in absentee voting is a 2021 state law that limits the number of drop boxes to one per 100,000 active voters in each county.
Early voting is dominated by older white voters this year. About 46% of early voters are white people over the age of 45. This is not surprising, since almost 30% of registered voters in the state belong to this demographic.
White women over the age of 65 are the largest demographic group of early voters, having already cast more than 297,000 ballots. They are followed in order by white men over 65, and white women and men ages 45-64. Black women ages 45-64 are the fifth-largest group.
