What could be the main event in Georgia’s twin US Senate runoffs — early in-person voting — begins on Monday.
More than half of the record 5 million votes in the November 3 general election were cast during the two-week early voting period. Early in-person voting could be even more important in the January 5 runoffs because of the short time frame for voters to request and send back ballots by mail, as the two races decide which party will control the US Senate.
“It’s very important,” Democrat Raphael Warnock, who is challenging Republican US Senator Kelly Loeffler in one of the races, said Friday after a speech to labor union canvassers.
“It’s how we won in the general and it’s how we’re going to win in the runoff.” No one expects turnout to be as high in the Warnock-Loeffler contest or the race between US Senator David Perdue and Democrat Jon Ossoff. But Bernard Fraga, an Emory University professor who studies voting, said overall turnout could rise as high as four million.
More than 125,000 people cast ballots in October on the first day of early in-person voting before the general election. Gabriel Sterling, election system implementation manager for the Georgia Secretary of State, said he expects a surge of people on Monday. Some Atlanta-area early voting sites in October and November saw people frequently lined up for hours.
“As always, on the first day of early voting, it’s kind of like when the iPhone comes out,” Sterling said last week. “People want to go get the new iPhone at the Apple store. They’re going to stand in line for a while.”
One question is how many mail-in ballots will be cast in the election. By Friday, 1.2 million mail-in ballots had been requested and 200,000 returned. In the general election, Democrat Joe Biden won 65 per cent of the 1.3 million absentee ballots that were returned, a record fueled by the coronavirus pandemic.