The first day of early voting Tuesday in the key swing state of Georgia has already set a new record for pre-Election Day votes, according to state election officials.
By 2:30 p.m. EST, a whopping 204,000 votes had been cast in person, crushing the previous record of 136,000 votes cast in 2020.
The numbers were verified by Gabriel Sterling, the Chief Operating Officer for the Secretary of State. “MASSIVE numbers!” Sterling posted on Twitter.
Georgia has three weeks of early voting, but with the overwhelming turnout on just the first day, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recommended that Georgians plan ahead for how they intend to vote in the upcoming election.
Raffensperger said his office’s goal at early voting sites and the 2,400 polling places on Election Day is to have voters spend "as little time as possible" filling out their ballots. It took the average voter only a few minutes to cast a ballot on Tuesday morning.
“If you want to vote absentee, make that decision today and get your request in,” Raffensperger said during a Tuesday briefing on the start of early voting. “If you are going to vote early, take a look at your calendar and decide when you are going to vote early, and if you are going to vote on Election Day, decide what time.”
“We want to make sure that they’re less than an hour. We loved when we had in 2022 the average wait time was less than three minutes and got down as low as two minutes at times,” Raffensperger said. “This morning, there appeared to be no slowdowns and lines have been moving everyone in less (time) than that.”