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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway
in battleground state
By Jason Morris, Nick Valencia, Devan Cole and Sara Murray, CNN
Updated:
11:07 PM EDT, Tue October 15, 2024
Source: CNN
A record number of on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a
critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from
Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that
have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.
More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the
Georgia secretary of state’s office . “So with the record breaking
1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000
total votes cast so far,” he said.
The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.
The swing state is one of the most closely watched this election, with
former President Donald Trump trying to reclaim it after losing there
to President Joe Biden by a small margin four years ago, leading Trump
and his allies to unsuccessfully push to overturn his defeat.
Those efforts have loomed large this year as new changes to how the
state conducts elections have been approved by Republican members of
the State Election Board, leading Democrats and others to mount legal
challenges, many of which have yet to be resolved even as Election Day
nears.
Despite the massive turnout on Tuesday, the process appeared to go
smoother this year for some Atlanta-area voters who spoke with CNN.
“Last time I voted, I voted in the city and the lines were out the
door. They only had like, maybe like three people working,” said
Corine Canada. “So people honestly just started leaving because it
was like that. Yeah, like, ‘This is too long. I can’t sit here
(and) wait, I have to go back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy.”
Parts of the state are continuing to recover from Hurricane Helene,
which hit the US last month and wreaked havoc on several other states
in the Southeast. Georgia election officials say absentee ballots went
out by the US Postal Service as scheduled and were not impacted by the
storm.
“So far, we have seen just over 250,000 voters request absentee
ballots. Perhaps in the next week or so, we’ll see that rise up to
300,000 – and that we think will probably look like around 5-6% of
all voters will be voting absentee this cycle,” Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said on Tuesday.
Experts say that some new state laws that tightened rules for absentee
ballots and cracked down on the availability of drop boxes may make the
option less appealing than early in-person voting.
While many drop boxes were available 24/7 in 2020, this year there will
be fewer of them, and they will be in election offices or early vote
locations with hours that tend to mimic normal business hours.
It’s also possible that the state could continue to see high numbers
of early votes given that Georgia law now mandates two Saturdays of
early voting and allows for two Sundays of early voting if a county
desires.
Raffensperger said Tuesday that safeguards are in place for a safe
election and that in addition to every race being audited, officials
will also randomly audit voting equipment to inspect.
“Pulling out a piece of equipment, a random audit on Election Day,
bring it to headquarters and then verify that it is recording the votes
accurately, that it has not been hacked by any bad actors out there,”
Raffensperger told reporters.
Raffensperger, who was in Trump’s crosshairs following the 2020
election, after a statewide machine recount in December 2020 that
confirmed that Biden beat Trump by just 11,779 votes out of nearly 5
million ballots cast in the Peach State.
Legal fights continue
Meanwhile, state judges are scrutinizing a number of new rules passed
by the Trump-backed Republican majority on the State Election Board
that Democrats warn could inject post-election “chaos” into the
Georgia.
After a marathon court hearing Tuesday, Fulton County Superior Court
Judge Robert McBurney that would have required officials to hand-count
the number of ballots cast at each polling place, criticizing state
election officials for approving it so close to Election Day. That rule
will be under another state judge’s microscope Wednesday as part of
cases brought against it by state and national Democrats and civil
rights groups.
McBurney is also still considering a separate rule passed by the board
in August that requires local election officials to conduct a
“reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them
– a mandate that Democrats say could give county election officials
broad authority to delay or decline altogether their certification of
the results “in a hunt for purported election irregularities.”
But McBurney sought to clear up any in a ruling this week in which he
said that local election officials have “a mandatory fixed obligation
to certify election results” in the days following the election –
dealing a blow to a GOP election official who had asked him to rule
that her duties around certification are “discretionary.”
What voters are saying
In line at an Atlanta-area precinct, two voters who identified as
Democrats said they were casting ballots for Harris in an effort to
avoid the kind of “chaos” they said surrounds Trump.
“It is essential that we vote today simply because we want to prevent
as much chaos as possible because Donald Trump has proved to be the
most vicious, uneducated, racist individual that we have
encountered,” said Fay Ainsworth.
“Well, we’ve got a crazy person running to be president and a very
competent young woman opposing him,” said Joseph Henry King Jr., 77.
Kareem Rosshandler, 32, who identifies as an independent, said he was
voting for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein to send a
message to Democrats over their support for Israel in its war with
Hamas.
“We’ve been calling for an arms embargo for the last year and they
haven’t been responding, and all the protests and the placards
won’t matter if we don’t deliver that message where it really
counts, which is at the ballots.”
“I mean, the Green Party wants to get rid of the Electoral
College,” Rosshandler added. “And that I think is fantastic because
right now we have a two-party system, and the only thing worse than
that is a one-party system and we’re not that far from that.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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