More than 600K ballots cast in Georgia early voting

Georgia residents are casting early voting ballots in record numbers with more than 600,000 votes recorded as of Wednesday, according to the office of Georgia’s secretary of state.

“As of 3:30pm we have broken past 200k today with 209,224 votes cast. So with the rest of today and absentees we could get close to 600,000 votes cast in Georgia,” Gabriel Sterling, chief operations officer for Georgia’s secretary of state, posted Wednesday on social platform X.

“We continue on the record setting pace and we are thankful for our election workers at the counties and our voters,” he wrote.

Sterling provided another update later Wednesday evening noting “massive numbers” for Peach State early voting.

“We are approaching 590,000 early votes cast. 34,272 accepted absentees. We are at nearly 620,000 total votes cast. So we are already at 8.6% turnout. Again…massive numbers. #gapol,” he wrote. 

Georgia is a critical state in this year’s presidential election. Polls have showed former President Trump and Vice President Harris locked in a tight race.

President Biden won Georgia narrowly in 2020 after Trump won the state in 2016. Georgia has generally been a reliable GOP state in presidential elections, but Biden’s victory and wins by Georgia Democratic Senate candidates have given the Democratic Party plenty of hope.

Early in person voting statistics toppled over the 600,000 mark Thursday morning, according to the state’s official website tracker. More than half of those ballots were counted Tuesday, the first day of early voting. 

“For those that claimed Georgia election laws were Jim Crow 2.0 and those that say democracy is dying…the voters of Georgia would like to have a word. Over 300,000 votes cast today,” Sterling shared in a post. “That’s 123% higher than the old record for the 1st day. Great job counties & voters.”

It is hard to glean much from the early voting numbers, though it could suggest a large turnout in the state.

Trump campaigned in Atlanta on Tuesday, focusing on his stronghold with voters seeking economic change. The ex-president has a 1.9 percentage point lead in the polling average kept by The Hill and Decision Desk HQ.

Since the start of the election, Republicans have raised questions about the state’s voting machines and the effectiveness of its security systems. A local judge rendered the Dominion Voting Systems safe for use in the general election earlier this month.

A different judge ruled Tuesday that state officials must move forward in certifying election results regardless of any suspicions of fraud that may arise.

“If election superintendents were, as Plaintiff urges, free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his ruling. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”