Early voting is reaching such heights that some polls in Georgia may be a “ghost town” on Election Day

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. – Flags telling people to “vote here” flew not only in English, but also in Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity Building as a steady stream passed through the doors to to cast their votes for the 2024 elections.

One by one, voters who came forward Thursday added to what has become a colossal pile of early ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, which was set to end Friday, was so robust that nearly 4 million ballots were able to be cast before Election Day arrived Tuesday.

“I normally try to vote early because I’m a mail carrier and it’s hard for me to get here on an election day,” said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump on Thursday before scattering leaves as he left in his red pick -up. .

Voters like King are part of the reason early voting records have been shattered, not just in Georgia and other presidential battleground states like North Carolina, but even in states without major elections like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the 2020 pandemic, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and voting by mail, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after wrongly blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept going.

In both elections, Republicans largely stayed away from early voting, preferring to do so on Election Day. This year, Trump has emphasized early voting and his supporters are responding. So far, Republicans have swamped the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. While they have also increased their vote-by-mail, this has happened at a much slower pace.

“The Trump effect is real,” said Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections, a conservative group focused on election policy.

So far, about 64 million people have voted in the 2024 election, which is more than a third of the total who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do, the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to AP Elections Data.

Of course, early election data doesn’t tell you who will win an election. It doesn’t tell you who voters support, just basic demographic information and sometimes party affiliation. One demographic group may seem unusually energetic as it dominates early voting, only to have no voters left on Election Day.

Campaigns encourage early voting because it allows them to “bank” their most reliable supporters, freeing up resources to become less likely supporters on Election Day.

“I’ve largely seen the idea of ​​going back to Election Day as an attempt to put toothpaste back in a tube,” Snead said.

Election officials say early voting is already producing impressive numbers. In North Carolina, all but two of the 25 western counties hardest hit by Hurricane Helene in late September are showing higher turnout rates compared to 2020.

Statewide, more than 3.7 million people had cast early in-person ballots as of early Friday, which is more than the number of early in-person votes for all of 2020, according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections. Early in-person voting ends Saturday afternoon in the state.

“Hurricane Helene did not stop us from voting,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board’s executive director and top voting official in that swing state. She added that voters were grateful and that “we see a lot of civility.”

So many people voted early in Georgia that a state election official says it could be a “ghost town” on Election Day.

There’s no doubt that some of that is thanks to Trump. Large signs at his rallies read: “VOTE EARLY!” and others have also pushed Republicans to cast their votes before Tuesday, even by mail.

“These elections are too important to wait!” exclaimed a flyer sent to a voter in Georgia by the Elon Musk-funded America PAC. “President Trump is counting on patriots like you to request an absentee ballot and save your vote today.”

Tona Barnes is someone who has heeded that message. Instead of voting on Election Day, she voted early for the first time Thursday in Marietta, a northern Atlanta suburb.

“He keeps putting it out there for early voting,” she said of Trump.

Others in Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans, say they are voting early for convenience.

Ashenafi Arega, who voted for Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday at the Mountain Park Activity Building in suburban Gwinnett County, said he voted early “to save time.”

“I think the line will be long on Election Day,” said Arega, who owns an import company. “It will be daunting.”

Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said Wednesday that the state had already reached two-thirds of its total turnout for the 2020 election, as Georgia registered a record nearly 5 million votes cast.

“There’s a possibility it could be a ghost town on Election Day,” Sterling said. “Less than a million people showed up during COVID in 2020 with all the use of voting before Election Day.”

In Georgia, almost as many people had voted early by then in 2020, but the turnout pattern was different. For a brief time during the pandemic, Georgia allowed voters to request ballots online without submitting a form with a hand-signed signature, and allowed counties to set up many drive-through drop boxes. But fueled by Trump’s insistence that he had been cheated, Republican lawmakers allowed only a very limited number of drop boxes in the future, imposed new deadlines for mail-in ballots and returned to requiring a hand-signed absentee request form.

That law and others in Georgia led to cries that Republicans were trying to suppress votes. Republicans said robust early turnout in 2024 proves that is not the case.

“I think that gives the lie to the idea that having some pretty basic safety measures in place somehow discourages people from voting,” said Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

But Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, pushes back against those statements, saying recent fights over state election board rules that ended with a judge throwing out the rules prove that Republicans are preparing to to decry the legitimacy of every vote they cast. not win in Georgia.

“I think there’s no question that these people were trying to muddy the waters a little bit to have something that they can possibly point to,” Olasanoye said.

Republicans are happy with turnout in heavily Republican counties, which in some cases is approaching two-thirds of active voters. Through Thursday, about 39% of voters in the predominantly Black Democratic stronghold of Augusta-Richmond County had cast ballots, while nearly 54% of voters in the neighboring Republican suburb of Columbia County had cast ballots.

“Just from a win-lose standpoint, the more votes I put in the bank on Friday, the fewer votes I have to push to the polls on Tuesday to win,” McKoon said.

Olasanoye, however, expressed confidence that Harris was broadening her coalition and would still win.

“Democrats and the vice president, we’re just doing a good job,” he said.