Turnout soars on state's 1st day of early voting

Numbers more than triple those from the 2014 midterm election.

Voters across Georgia rushed to the polls Monday, the first day of in-person early voting, with 69,049 people casting ballots.

That’s a sharp increase from the last midterm election in 2014, when 20,898 people showed up on the first day of in-person early voting, according to numbers from the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office.

Topping the ballot is a tight contest for governor between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Channel 2 Action News poll last week showed them locked in a close battle — within the poll’s

2.8 percentage-point margin of error — and revealed a pool of undecided voters that had shrunk to 4 percent.

“For a gubernatorial election, it’s higher than average,” DeKalb County Election Director Erica Hamilton said about the turnout during a phone interview with the AJC.

In DeKalb, about 10,000 residents came to the polls Monday, well ahead of the 2,098 who cast ballots on the first day of in-person early voting during the last midterm election.

Hamilton called the turnout in DeKalb comparable to 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president.

Some early voters in Cobb County had to wait in lines for more than two hours, and others in Fulton County encountered delays because of technical difficulties.

On Monday, the vast parking lot of the Cobb County Board of Elec-tions (housed in a former Kroger location) quickly filled. So did the McDonald’s parking lot next door. And the Dunkin Donuts across the street. And the now-vacant former Rite Aid location beside that.

Mary Ansley Southerland, daughter of the late Ansley Meaders, a two-term Marietta mayor, saw the hordes and kept driving.

“I really don’t get it,” she said. “It was almost like the people thought their vote wouldn’t count unless they got there yesterday.”

Things were less frenzied in Buckhead. Boyd Leake cast his ballot without delay on Monday at the Buckhead Library.

“Plenty of people there, but no line,” he reported.

This phase is increasingly important in Georgia elections.

In 2014, roughly 37 percent of voters filled out their ballots before Election Day. That jumped to nearly 60 percent in the 2016 presidential election.

When mailed-in ballots are added to in-person early votes, a total of 129,458 Georgians had already voted through Monday in advance of the Nov. 6 general election, which in addition to the governor’s race features contests for every seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and the state Legislature, as well as lieutenant governor and every other statewide position in Georgia government.

At the same point in the midterm election cycle four years ago, just 46,086 people had voted, according to georgiavotes.com.

Early voting lasts until Nov. 2 and includes at least one Saturday statewide, on Oct. 27. Some counties have additional voting times available on weekends.

The second day of early voting remained busy, DeKalb’s Hamilton said.

“It wasn’t quite like yesterday where we had a big rush,” she said Tuesday, “but it’s a steady constant flow all day today.”