Early voting opened this week for Georgia’s upcoming midterm election and voter turnout is already breaking records. By Tuesday, the second day of early voting, the tally had surpassed the number of votes cast two days into early voting for the 2020 presidential election and nearly doubled the 2018 number.
As of Wednesday, early voting had increased 85 percent since the previous midterm four years ago, according to data released by Gabriel Sterling, a senior aide in the secretary of state’s office. “We have reviewed the turnout yesterday and we did set a midterm 1st day of early voting & we nearly hit the record for a Presidential,” Sterling noted.
Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger applauded the massive turnout in a press release Wednesday. “We’re extremely pleased that so many Georgians are able to cast their votes, in record numbers and without any reports of substantial delays. This is a testament to the hard work of Georgia’s election workers, the professionals who keep our elections convenient and secure,” Raffensperger said.
The first day of early voting also saw record turnout for a midterm election year.
While historical trends suggest the increase in early voting will advantage Democrats, the trend has been cheered by many Republicans. The turnout undermines Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Stacey Abrams’s biting criticism of Georgia as a state plagued by voter suppression. In 2018, Abrams squared off and lost to Republican Brian Kemp in Georgia’s gubernatorial election, which was decided by about 55,000 votes amongst nearly four million ballots.
Following Abrams’s tantalizingly close defeat, she went on a public relations campaign repeatedly alleging that the election was “stolen” and even suggested in a New York Times interview that she was actually victorious. In the intervening years since Abrams’s defeat, she has sowed the seeds of voter suppression and hinted at Kemp’s illegitimacy. Abrams refused to refer to Kemp as the “legitimate” governor of Georgia and referenced voter suppression as a major factor in her defeat.
“In response to what I believe was a stolen election–and I’m not saying they stole it from me–they stole it from the voters of Georgia. I cannot prove empirically that I would’ve won, but we’ll never know,” Abrams claimed during a 2019 speech featuring Bill de Blasio at the National Action Network.
Abrams, who now denies she ever questioned the legitimacy of Kemp’s victory, is trailing the Republican incumbent in polling less than a month before election day.