Georgia Voters Have Already Smashed Turnout Records on Day One of Early Voting
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PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Voting booth
Monday marked day one of early voting in Georgia, where two hotly contested races for governor and for a Senate seat will be decided next month. Already, voter turnout in the state has smashed previous records.
Georgia's WSV-TV reports that, according to the the Georgia Secretary of State's office, more than 100,000 Georgians had cast their ballots early as of 4:15 p.m. on Monday.
"This blows away the previous midterm first-day record of approximately 72,000, and we have lots of voting to go today," elections official Gabe Sterling told the outlet.
Interest is high in this year's election at least in part due to a contest that could determine which party controls the Senate. Poll numbers show a close race between football legend Herschel Walker, who has never run for elected office before, and Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock, a popular reverend who flipped the Senate seat blue last year.
Walker, 60, won a landslide victory in the state's Republican primary, garnering more than 68% of the vote. But his campaign has faltered in recent weeks, due to accusations that he lied about everything from graduating from college to having access to a COVID-killing spray before vaccines rolled out. Most notably, Walker has been called into question about how many children he's secretly fathered and whether he's paid for women to have abortions.
Walker has repeatedly defended his statements.
The Georgia gubernatorial race is also hotly contested, and pits voting rights activist Stacey Abrams against the state's current Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
The race will be a rematch of sorts as Abrams, a longtime Democratic lawmaker, narrowly lost the 2018 Georgia governor's race to Kemp, a defeat that propelled her to become one of the country's leading voices on the importance of — and challenges to — voting rights.
Two groups founded by Abrams — the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight — have been central to an enormous registration drive in Georgia in recent years, including some 800,000 new voters between 2018 and the 2020 election.
Those voter-registration efforts set the backdrop for November 2020's presidential surprise, when some 5 million ballots were cast in Georgia, smashing the previous record. Joe Biden ultimately defeated Donald Trump in the state — the first Democrat to win statewide there in decades.
Check your voter registration, locate your polling place, and make a voting plan at Vote.org to ensure that your voice is heard this election season.
